“To tell the truth nobody ever dreamed that he would be elected,” replied Stephen, flushing.  “Who would have thought that an independent candidate could win over both parties?”

The Judge had moved to the door, and he looked back, as Stephen finished, with a dramatic flourish of his long white hand.  “Well, remember next time, my dear young sir,” he answered, “that in politics it is always the impossible that happens.”  The long white hand fell caressingly on the shoulders of old Powhatan Plummer, and the two men passed out of the door together.

When Stephen turned to Corinna, she was resting languidly against the tapestry-covered back of her chair, while the firelight flickering in her eyes changed them to the deep bronze of the marigolds on the table.  With her slenderness, her grace, her brilliant darkness, she seemed to him to belong in one of the English mezzotints on the wall.

“Did you buy that print because it is so much like you?” he asked, pointing to an engraving after Hoppner’s portrait of the Duchess of Bedford.

She laughed frankly.  “Every one asks me that.  I suppose it was one of my reasons.”

As he sat down again in front of the fire, his eyes travelled slowly over the walls; over the stipple engravings of Bartolozzi, over the rich mezzotints of Valentine Green and John Raphael Smith, over the bewitching face of Lady Hamilton as it shone back at him from the prints of John Jones, of Cheesman, of Henry Meyer.  Was not Corinna’s place among those vanished beauties of a richer age, rather than among the sour-faced reformers and the Gideon Vetches of to-day?  The wonderful tone of the old prints, the silvery dusk, or the softly glowing colours that were like the sunset of another century; the warmth and splendour of the few brocades she had picked up in Italy; the suave religious feeling of the worn red velvet from some church in Florence; the candles in wrought-iron sconces, the shimmering firelight and the dreamy fragrance of tea roses—­all these things together made him think suddenly of sunshine over the Campagna and English gardens in the month of May and the burning reds and blues and golden greens of the Middle Ages.  Corinna with her unfading youth became a part of all the loveliness that he had ever seen—­of all beauty everywhere.

“I haven’t had a chance to tell you,” she said, “that I am going to meet the Governor.”

“Where?  At the Berkeleys’?”

“Yes, at the Berkeleys’ dinner on Thursday.  Are you going?”

He laughed.  “Mrs. Berkeley called me up this morning and asked me if I would take somebody’s place.  She didn’t say whose place it was, but she did divulge the fact that the dinner is given to Vetch.  I told her I’d come—­that I was so used to taking other people’s places I could fill six at the same time.  But a dinner to Vetch!  I wonder why she is doing it?”

“That’s easy.  Mr. Berkeley wants something from the Governor.  I don’t know what he wants, but I do know that whatever it is he wants it very badly.”