“I assure you, I have been positively longing to have you gratify my curiosity,” declared Miss Preston.  “You know you do such dear, eccentric things that we couldn’t exist without you—­at least I couldn’t because I should perish of boredom.  No, you shan’t escape just yet, so stop looking at that beautiful Mrs. Galt.  You must tell me first if it is really true that you once carried a woman out of a burning building in your right hand.  It is so delightful to be strong, don’t you think?”

The governor regarded her gravely.  Before her animated chatter his gravity became almost grotesque.  “The only burning building I was ever in was a burning smoke-house,” he returned quietly.  “I never carried a woman out of anything in either hand.”

There was a bored expression in his eyes, and he glanced beyond the group to where Juliet stood surrounded.

“Pardon me,” he said in a moment, and passed on.

In the crowd about him, where pretty women were as plentiful as pinks in a garden bed, he moved awkwardly, with the hesitating steps of a man who is uncertain of his pathway.  His powerful frame and the splendid vigour in his daring strides seemed out of place amid a profusion of exotics that trembled as he passed.  His appearance suggested the battlegrounds of nature—­high places, or the breadth of the open fields; at the plough he would have been grandly picturesque, in the centre of a throng of graceful men and women he loomed merely large and ill at ease.  Above his evening clothes his face showed rough, rather than refined, and his stubborn jaw gave an impression of heaviness.

As he reached Juliet she uttered an exclamation of pleasure and held out her hand.  “Emma, you have heard of my Sunday-school scholar,” she said to a girl beside her.  “My prize scholar, I mean.  Sally, have you seen the governor?”

Emma Carr, a pink-and-white girl who bore herself with the air of an acknowledged belle, bowed, with a platitude that sounded original on her lovely lips, and Sally Bassett turned with a hearty handshake.

“And he is our Nick Burr!” she exclaimed.  “Tom, where are you?”

She spoke with an impulsive flutter which he had remembered as the sparkle of mere girlish liveliness.  Now he saw that it had degenerated into a restlessness that appeared to result from a continued waste of nervous energy.  She looked older than Juliet, though she was in fact much younger, and her face was drawn and heavily lined as if by years of ill-health.  Her physical strength was prodigious; one perceived it with the suddenness of surprise.  Much the same impression was produced by her youthful manner in connection with her worn features; yet, in spite of her faded prettiness, there was a singular charm in her unabated vivacity.

She darted off in pursuit of Tom, to be arrested by the first newcomer she encountered, and Nicholas was responding gravely to Juliet’s banter when his eyes fell full upon Eugenia Battle as she stood at a little distance.