“You looked so much like Mr. Benham a little way off,” said Patty, as he turned to walk back with her, “that I might have mistaken you for him.”

“If you only knew it,” he replied, laughing, “you have paid me the highest compliment of my life.”

She blushed.  “I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

“That makes it all the better.  But don’t you like Benham?”

Patty pondered the question.  “I can’t get near enough to him either to like or dislike him.  He is very good looking.”

“He is more than good looking.  He is magnificent.”

“You think a great deal of him?”

“I couldn’t think more,” he responded with young enthusiasm.  “Every one feels that way about him.  He stands for—­well, for everything that one would like to be.”

“I’ve heard of him, of course,” said the girl slowly.  “Father has been fighting him ever since he went into politics; but I never saw Mr. Benhem close enough to speak to him until the other evening.”  She raised her black lashes and looked straight at Stephen with her challenging glance.  “All the men seemed so serious, except you.”

He laughed and flushed slightly.  “And I did not?”

Though her manner could not have been more indifferent, there was an undercurrent of feeling in her voice, as if she meant something more than she had put into words.  He might take it as he chose, lightly or seriously, her look implied—­and it was, he admitted, a thrilling look from such eyes as hers.

“You are nearer my age,” she rejoined, “though you do seem so old sometimes.”

A depressing dampness fell on his mood.  “Do I seem old to you?  I am only twenty-six.”

Her inquiring eyebrows were raised in mockery.  “That is too old to play, isn’t it?”

“Well, I might try,” he answered, and added curiously, “I wonder whom you find to play with?  Not your father?”

“Oh, no, not Father.  He is as serious as Mr. Benham, only he laughs a great deal more.  Father jokes all the time, but there is something underneath that isn’t a joke at all.”

“I should like to talk to your father.  I want to find out, if I can, what he really believes.”

“You won’t find out that,” said Patty, “by talking to him.”

“You mean he will not tell me?”

“Oh, he may tell you; but you won’t know it.  Half the time when he is telling the truth, it sounds like a joke, and that keeps people from believing him.  He says the best way to keep a secret is to shout it from the housetops; and I’ve heard him say things straight out that sounded so far fetched nobody would think he was in earnest.  I was the only person who knew that he was speaking the truth.  They call that a ‘method’, the politicians.  They used to like it before he was elected; but now it makes them restless.  They complain that they can’t do anything with him.”

“That,” remarked Stephen, as she paused, “appears to be the chronic complaint of politicians.”