“So Gershom asked you to give me a message?” remarked Vetch abruptly to Patty.  “Where did you see him?”

“He joined me when I went out,” replied Patty, speaking slowly and carefully with her eyes on Corinna.  “I tried to slip away, but he wouldn’t let me.  He asked me to speak to you about something that was worrying him, and a great many others, he said.  He didn’t put it into words, but I think he meant the strike—­”

Vetch looked up quickly.  “Oh, that is worrying him, is it?”

“What is it all about, Father?  Why are they going to strike?”

“Can you answer that, Mrs. Page?” The Governor turned to Corinna with a sportive gesture, as if he were casting upon her the burden of a reply.  His smile was sketched so faintly about his mouth that it seemed merely to emphasize the gravity of his expression.

“I?” Corinna looked round with a start of surprise.  “Why, what should I know of it?”

“Then they don’t talk about it where you are?”

“Oh, yes, they talk about it a great deal.”  She appeared to hesitate, and then added with deliberate audacity, “but they think that you know more about it than any one else.”

He did not smile as he answered her.  “Do they expect the men to strike?”

Though she made a graceful gesture of evasion, she met his question frankly.  “They expect them to, I gather—­unless you prevent it.”

A shade of irritation crossed his features.  “How can I prevent it?  They have a right to stop work.”

“They seem to think, the people I know, that it depends upon how safe the leaders think it will be.”

“How safe?  I can’t tie their hands, can I?”

“Of course I am only repeating what I hear.”  She gazed at him with friendly eyes.  “No one could know less about it than I do.”

“People are saying, I suppose,” he continued in a tone of exasperation, “that these men had an understanding with me before I came into office.  They seem to think that I can make the strike a success by standing aside and holding my hands.  That, of course, is pure nonsense.  If the men want to stop work, nobody has a right to interfere with them.  Certainly I haven’t.  But have they the right—­the question hangs on this point—­to interfere with the farmers who want to get their crops to market as badly as the strikers want to quit work?  The kind of general strike these people have in mind bears less relation to industry than it does to war; and you know what I think about war and the rights of non-combatants.  They want to tie up the whole system of transportation until they starve their opponents into submission.  The old damnable Prussian theory again, you see, that crops up wherever men take the stand, which they do everywhere they have the power, that might is a law unto itself.  Now, I am with these men exactly half way, and no further.  As long as their method of striking doesn’t interfere with the rights of the public, they seem to me fair enough.  But when it comes to raising the price of food still higher and cutting off the city milk supply—­well, when they talk of that, then I begin to think of the human side of it.”  He broke off abruptly, and concluded in a less serious tone, “that’s the only thing in the whole business I care about—­the human side of it all—­”