“Then you must have enjoyed it?”

“But you were there.  You saw what happened.  Every one must have seen.”  Her savage candour brushed away the flimsy amenities.  He knew now that she would say whatever she pleased, and, with the pigeon clasped tightly in his arms, he waited for anything that might come.

“You pretend that you don’t know, that you didn’t see!” she asked indignantly.

As she looked at him he thought—­or it may have been the effect of the shifting light—­that her eyes diffused soft green rays beneath her black eyelashes.  Was there really the mist of tears in her sparkling glance?

“I am sorry,” he said simply, being a young man of few words when the need of speech was obvious.  The last thing he wanted, he told himself, was to receive the confidences of the Governor’s daughter.

At this declaration, so characteristic of his amiable temperament, her anger flashed over him.  “You were not sorry.  You know you were not, or you would have made them kinder!”

“Kinder?  But how could I?” He felt that her rage was making her unreasonable.  “I didn’t know you.  I hadn’t even been introduced to you.”  It was on the tip of his tongue to add, “and I haven’t been yet—­” but he checked himself in fear of unchaining the lightning.  It was all perfectly true.  He had not even been introduced to the girl, and here she was, as crude as life and as intemperate, accusing him of indifference and falsehood.  And after all, what had they done to her?  No one had been openly rude.  Nothing had been said, he was sure, absolutely nothing.  It had been a “charity entertainment,” and the young people of his set had merely left her alone, that was all.  The affair had been far from exclusive—­for the enterprising ladies of the Beech Tree Day Nursery had prudently preferred a long subscription list to a limited social circle—­and in a gathering so obscurely “mixed” there were, without doubt, a number of Gideon Vetch’s admirers.  Was it maliciously arranged by Fate that Patty Vetch’s social success should depend upon the people who had elected her father to office?

“As if that mattered!”

Her scorn of his subterfuge, her mocking defiance of the sacred formula to which he deferred, awoke in him an unfamiliar and pleasantly piquant sensation.  Through it all he was conscious of the inner prick and sting of his disapprobation, as if the swift attraction had passed into a mental aversion.

“As if that mattered!” he echoed gaily, “as if that mattered at all!”

Her face changed in the twilight, and it seemed to him that he saw her for the first time with the peculiar vividness that came only in dreams or in the hidden country within his mind.  The sombre arch of the sky, the glimmer of lights far away, the clustering shadows against the white field of snow, the vague ghostly shapes of the sycamores—­all these things endowed her with the potency of romantic adventure.  In the winter night she seemed to him to exhale the roving sweetness of spring.  Then she spoke, and the sharp brightness of his vision was clouded by the old sense of unreality.