“Only once or twice,” he answered at last.  “She is looking badly since her divorce.  Freedom has not agreed with her.”

Corinna smiled; but the transient illumination veiled rather than revealed her obscure motives.

“Perhaps, like our Allies, she was making the future safe for further entanglements,” she observed.  “I always thought—­everybody thought that she got her divorce in order to marry John Benham.”

Frankly perplexed, he gazed wonderingly into her eyes.  He knew that she saw a great deal of Benham; he believed that their friendship had developed into a deeper emotion on Benham’s side at least; and it seemed to him unlike Corinna, who was, as he told himself, the most loyal soul on earth, to turn such an association into a cynical jest.

“I heard that too,” he replied guardedly, “but of course nobody knows.”

There was really nothing else that he could answer.  Though he could discuss Alice Rokeby, one of those vague, sweet women who seem designed by Nature to develop the sentiment of chivalry in the breast of man, he felt that it would be disloyal to speak lightly of his hero, John Benham.  “You could never guess where I’ve been,” he said with relief because he had got rid of the subject.  “I might as well tell you in the beginning that I have just left the Governor.”

“Gideon Vetch!” exclaimed Corinna, as she dropped into a chair at his side.  “Why, I thought you were as far apart as the poles!”

“So we were until ten minutes—­no, until exactly an hour ago.”

“It makes my blood boil when I think of that circus rider in the Governor’s mansion,” said the General indignantly.  “Do you know what my father would have called that fellow?  He would have called him a common scalawag—­a common scalawag, sir!”

The Judge laughed softly.  There was nothing, as he sometimes observed, that flavoured life so deliciously as a keen appreciation of comedy.  “Now, I should call him a decidedly uncommon one,” he remarked.  “The trouble with you, my dear Powhatan, is that you are still in the village stage of the social instinct.  In your proper period, when we Virginians were merely one of the several tribes in these United States, you may have served an excellent purpose; but the tribal instinct is dying out with the village stage.  If we are going to exist at all outside of the archaeological department of a museum, we must learn to accept—.  We must let in new blood.”

“Do you mean to tell me, Horatio,” blustered the General, “that I’ve got to let in the blood of a circus rider, sir?”

“Well, that depends.  I haven’t made up my mind about Vetch.  He may be only froth, or he may be the vital element that we need.  I haven’t made up my mind, but I’ve met him and I like him.  Indeed, I think I may say that Gideon and I are friends.  We have come to the same point of view, it appears, by travelling on opposite roads.  I had a long talk with him the other day, and I found that we think alike about a number of things.”