Mrs. Nimick at this dried her eyes, renewed her clutch on her draperies, and stood glancing sentimentally about the room while her brother rang for the carriage.

“I take away a lovely picture of you,” she murmured.  “It’s wonderful what you’ve made of this hideous house.”

“Ah, not I, but Ella—­there she doesreign undisputed,” he acknowledged, following her glance about the library, which wore an air of permanent habitation, of slowly formed intimacy with its inmates, in marked contrast to the gaudy impersonality of the usual executive apartment.

“Oh, she’s wonderful, quite wonderful.  I see she has got those imported damask curtains she was looking at the other day at Fielding’s.  When I am asked how she does it all, I always say it’s beyond me!” Mrs. Nimick murmured.

“It’s an art like another,” smiled the Governor.  “Ella has been used to living in tents and she has the knack of giving them a wonderful look of permanence.”

“She certainly makes the most extraordinary bargains—­all the knack in the world won’t take the place of such curtains and carpets.”

“Are they good?  I’m glad to hear it.  But all the good curtains and carpets won’t make a house comfortable to live in.  There’s where the knack comes in, you see.”

He recalled with a shudder the lean Congressional years—­the years before his marriage—­when Mrs. Nimick had lived with him in Washington, and the daily struggle in the House had been combined with domestic conflicts almost equally recurrent.  The offer of a foreign mission, though disconnecting him from active politics, had the advantage of freeing him from his sister’s tutelage, and in Europe, where he remained for two years, he had met the lady who was to become his wife.  Mrs. Renfield was the widow of one of the diplomatists who languish in perpetual first secretary-ship at our various embassies.  Her life had given her ease without triviality, and a sense of the importance of politics seldom found in ladies of her nationality.  She regarded a public life as the noblest and most engrossing of careers, and combined with great social versatility an equal gift for reading blue-books and studying debates.  So sincere was the latter taste that she passed without regret from the amenities of a European life well stocked with picturesque intimacies to the rawness of the Midsylvanian capital.  She helped Mornway in his fight for the Governorship as a man likes to be helped by a woman—­by her tact, her good looks, her memory for faces, her knack of saying the right thing to the right person, and her capacity for obscure hard work in the background of his public activity.  But, above all, she helped him by making his private life smooth and harmonious.  For a man careless of personal ease, Mornway was singularly alive to the domestic amenities.  Attentive service, well-ordered dinners, brightly burning fires, and a scent of flowers in the house—­these material