To her surprise he did not laugh at this.  “Do I resemble you?” he asked simply.

“Father thinks so.  He says that people won’t take us seriously because we tell them the truth.”

An impression drifted like smoke across the blue of his eyes.  Who was it, she wondered, who had said that his eyes were gray?  “Don’t they take you seriously?” he asked.

“As a woman, yes.  As a human being, no.”

He smiled.  “You are too deep.  I can’t follow.  I understand only the plain bright ideas of the half educated, you know.”

Her brilliant glance shone on him steadily.  “I shan’t try to explain.  What one doesn’t understand without an explanation isn’t worth knowing.  But somebody must take you seriously, or you wouldn’t be where you are.”

“Do you know where I am?” he demanded impulsively.

“I know that you are Governor of Virginia.”

“Oh, that!  I thought you meant something more than that,” he returned with a note of disappointment in his voice.

“What could I mean more than that?  Isn’t it the first step upward in a political career?”

“Perhaps.  But I was thinking of something else.  The chief thing seems to me to be to work a way out of the muddle.  Anybody may be Governor or even President if he tries hard enough—­but it is a different matter to bring some kind of order out of this confusion.  I’ve got an idea that I’ve been hammering at for the last twenty years.  Not a great one, perhaps, though I think it is; and I’d like to get a chance to put it into practice before I die.  I want to wake up people and tell them the truth.”

Was he, for all his matter-of-fact appearance, simply another political dreamer, another visionary without a definite vision?

“And will they listen when you tell them?” she asked.

He laughed.  “Who knows what may happen?  When I was a kid in the circus—­you have heard, of course, that I spent my childhood in a travelling circus”—­how simply he brought this out!—­“the fat woman, we called her ‘the fat lady’ in those days, had a favourite proverb:  ’When the skies fall we shall catch larks’.  I reckon when the skies fall the people will learn wisdom.”

“But you have caught your larks, haven’t you?”

“No, I used to set snares by the hundred, but I never caught anything better than a sparrow.”

A wistful look crossed her face, and for an instant the youth seemed to droop and fade in her eyes.  “Isn’t that life?—­sparrows for larks always?”

His sanguine spirit rejected this as she had known that it would.  “Life is all right,” he replied, “as long as there’s a fighting chance left to you.  That is the only thing that makes it worth while, fighting to win.”

She gazed meditatively at the points of flame on the white candles.  “I suppose it would be so with you; for you fit into the age.  You are a part of this variable uncertain quantity called democracy, which some of us old-fashioned folk look upon as a boomerang.”