details, which had come to seem the extension of his wife’s personality, the inevitable result of her nearness, were as agreeable to him after five years of marriage as in the first surprise of his introduction to them.  Mrs. Nimick had kept house jerkily and vociferously; Ella performed the same task silently and imperceptibly, and the results were all in favor of the latter method.  Though neither the Governor nor his wife had large means, the household, under Mrs. Mornway’s guidance, took on an air of sober luxury as agreeable to her husband as it was exasperating to her sister-in-law.  The domestic machinery ran without a jar.  There were no upheavals, no debts, no squalid cookless hiatuses between intervals of showy hospitality; the household moved along on lines of quiet elegance and comfort, behind which only the eye of the housekeeping sex could have detected a gradually increasing scale of expense.

Such an eye was now projected on the Governor’s surroundings, and its explorations were summed up in the tone in which Mrs. Nimick repeated from the threshold:  “I always say I don’t see how she does it!”

The tone did not escape the Governor, but it disturbed him no more than the buzz of a baffled insect.  Poor Grace!  It was not his fault if her husband was given to chimerical investments, if her sons were “unsatisfactory,” and her cooks would not stay with her; but it was natural that these facts should throw into irritating contrast the ease and harmony of his own domestic life.  It made him all the sorrier for his sister to know that her envy did not penetrate to the essence of his happiness, but lingered on those external signs of well-being which counted for so little in the sum total of his advantages.  Poor Mrs. Nimick’s life seemed doubly thin and mean when one remembered that, beneath its shabby surface, there were no compensating riches of the spirit.

II

IT was the custodian of his own hidden treasure who at this moment broke in upon his musings.  Mrs. Mornway, fresh from her afternoon walk, entered the room with that air of ease and lightness which seemed to diffuse a social warmth about her; fine, slender, pliant, so polished and modeled by an intelligent experience of life that youth seemed clumsy in her presence.  She looked down at her husband and shook her head.

“You promised to keep the afternoon to yourself, and I hear Grace has been here.”

“Poor Grace—­she didn’t stay long, and I should have been a brute not to see her.”

He leaned back, filling his gaze to the brim with her charming image, which obliterated at a stroke the fretful ghost of Mrs. Nimick.

“She came to congratulate you, I suppose?”

“Yes, and to ask me to do something for Ashford.”

“Ah—­on account of Jack.  What does she want for him?”

The Governor laughed.  “She said you were in her confidence—­that you were backing her up.  She seemed to think your support would ensure her success.”