“But you also—­you love beauty as I do.”

“But I can’t own it—­not as you do.”  He was speaking frankly.  “I haven’t the means.  At least what I have I have made myself, and therefore I guard it more carefully.  It is only those who have once been poor who are really under the curse of money, for that curse is the inability to understand that money is less valuable than anything else on earth that you happen to need or desire.  Now to me the most terrible thing on earth is not to be without beauty, but to be without money—­”

She smiled.  “You are talking like Gideon Vetch.”

He caught at the name quickly.  “Like Gideon Vetch?  You mean that I sound ignoble?”

The laughter in his eyes made him look almost boyish, and she felt that she had come suddenly close to him.  After all he was very attractive.

“Is he ignoble?” she asked.  “I have seen him only once, and that was at the dinner a week ago.”

He looked at her intently.  “I should like to know what you think.”

“I hardly know—­but—­well, I must confess that I was disappointed.”

“You expected something better?”

She hesitated over her answer.  “I expected something different.  I suppose I looked for the dash of purple—­or at least of red—­in his appearance.”

“And he seemed ordinary?”

“In a way—­yes.  His features are not striking, and yet when he talks to you and gets interested in his own ideas, he sheds a kind of warmth that is like magnetism.  I couldn’t analyse it, but it is there.”

“That, I suppose, is the charm of which they talk.  Warmth, or perhaps heat, is a better word for it.  Fortunately I’m proof against it because of what you might call an asbestos temperament; but I’ve seen it catch fire in a crowd, and it sweeps over an audience like a blaze over a prairie.  It is a cheap kind of oratory; yet it is a power in unscrupulous hands—­and Vetch is unscrupulous.”

“You believe that?”

“I know it.  It has been proved again and again that he will stoop to any means in order to advance his ideas, which mean of course his ambition.  Oh, I’m not denying that in the main he is sincere, that he believes in his phrases.  As a matter of fact one has only to look at his appointments, those that he is able to make by his own authority!  There isn’t a doubt in the world that he deliberately sold his office in exchange for his election—­”

So this was one honest man’s view of Gideon Vetch!  John Benham believed this accusation, for some infallible intuition told her that Benham would never have repeated it, even as a rumour, if he had not believed it.  Her father’s genial defence of the Governor; his ironic aristocratic sympathy with the radical point of view appeared superficial and unconvincing beside Benham’s moral repudiation.  And yet what after all was the simple truth about Gideon Vetch?  What was the true colour of that