The voice was feminine; the commissioner was of the race of cavaliers who make salaam before the trail of a skirt without considering the quality of its cloth.

There stood in the door a faded woman, one of the numerous sisterhood of the unhappy.  She was dressed all in black—­poverty’s perpetual mourning for lost joys.  Her face had the contours of twenty and the lines of forty.  She may have lived that intervening score of years in a twelve-month.  There was about her yet an aurum of indignant, unappeased, protesting youth that shone faintly through the premature veil of unearned decline.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” said the commissioner, gaining his feet to the accompaniment of a great creaking and sliding of his chair.

“Are you the governor, sir?” asked the vision of melancholy.

The commissioner hesitated at the end of his best bow, with his hand in the bosom of his double-breasted “frock.”  Truth at last conquered.

“Well, no, ma’am.  I am not the governor.  I have the honour to be Commissioner of Insurance, Statistics, and History.  Is there anything, ma’am, I can do for you?  Won’t you have a chair, ma’am?”

The lady subsided into the chair handed her, probably from purely physical reasons.  She wielded a cheap fan—­last token of gentility to be abandoned.  Her clothing seemed to indicate a reduction almost to extreme poverty.  She looked at the man who was not the governor, and saw kindliness and simplicity and a rugged, unadorned courtliness emanating from a countenance tanned and toughened by forty years of outdoor life.  Also, she saw that his eyes were clear and strong and blue.  Just so they had been when he used them to skim the horizon for raiding Kiowas and Sioux.  His mouth was as set and firm as it had been on that day when he bearded the old Lion Sam Houston himself, and defied him during that season when secession was the theme.  Now, in bearing and dress, Luke Coonrod Sandifer endeavoured to do credit to the important arts and sciences of Insurance, Statistics, and History.  He had abandoned the careless dress of his country home.  Now, his broad-brimmed black slouch hat, and his long-tailed “frock” made him not the least imposing of the official family, even if his office was reckoned to stand at the tail of the list.

“You wanted to see the governor, ma’am?” asked the commissioner, with a deferential manner he always used toward the fair sex.

“I hardly know,” said the lady, hesitatingly.  “I suppose so.”  And then, suddenly drawn by the sympathetic look of the other, she poured forth the story of her need.

It was a story so common that the public has come to look at its monotony instead of its pity.  The old tale of an unhappy married life—­made so by a brutal, conscienceless husband, a robber, a spendthrift, a moral coward and a bully, who failed to provide even the means of the barest existence.  Yes, he had come down in the scale so low as to strike her.  It happened only the day before—­there was the bruise on one temple—­she had offended his highness by asking for a little money to live on.  And yet she must needs, woman-like, append a plea for her tyrant—­he was drinking; he had rarely abused her thus when sober.