Thenceforth Cora Shelby's respect for the fearless strategist in Quality Row verged upon awe. If Mrs. Teunis Van Dam now deigned to assist at one of the weekly house-openings, the occasion savored of an aroma which the united patronage of Mrs. Tommy Kidder and the ladies of the lieutenant-governor, the secretary of state, the controller, the treasurer, and the entire bench of the Court of Appeals could not exhale. Cora made sure of her good offices for the legislative reception weeks in advance, and in all matters, save only Handsome Ludlow, deferred anxiously to the great exemplar's code.

No one who thought twice about Mrs. Van Dam escaped the reflection that she was a descendant, and Cora with her mind running continually on this shoot of a peculiarly sightly family tree, was as fired by this truism of natural law as if it had lain all the centuries awaiting her discovery. Those delightful magicians of figures, who as easy as asking prove William the Conqueror the mathematical begetter of us all, had hitherto contented her; but such sweets cloyed before Mrs. Van Dam's august line of Dutch and English forebears, who had considerately made history and bequeathed portraits and plate. But the path of Japhet in search of a father was primrose beside the American's in search of an ancestor, and Cora's researches were long barren of result. The labyrinth of Brown, her maiden name, she speedily forsook, though at the outset it seemed to run promisingly to knighthood, literature, and art; Huggins, her mother's name, was impossible, and Hilliard, more sounding, clearly out of the question; while the Shelbys, to whom she turned in last resort, seemed hopelessly commonplace. Ross's father, to her own knowledge, had done little but drink; and the grandfather, though of sterner stuff, as became a pioneer, was handicapped by his unlucky distillery. The governor's own notions about his family were the vaguest. Like many Americans, he had the impression that its beginnings traced to two brothers who immigrated to this country prior to the Revolution in which they served.

"The Revolution seems to be the Norman Conquest of American genealogy," he remarked in the course of his wife's cross-examination.

"But don't you know their names, or what they did in the war?" she queried anxiously.

Shelby shook his head.

"Perhaps they were teamsters," he laughed.

Cora was too pained to jest. Mrs. Van Dam was a "daughter" of this and that society by virtue of descent from generals.

For a time the chase now circled teasingly round a southern branch whose achievements were notable, but the unconcern of the distiller with regard to vital statistics balked a happy union of North and South, and goaded Cora to that last desperate ditch of the ancestor-hunter—a blind leap over seas. In the fortunate isles where choice forefathers flourish thick as buttercups, Cora made her foray with hunger's lawless haste, enlisted the aid of an indigent person skilled in blazonry, and in good season brought her spoils to the governor.

"I've had bother enough getting this," she said, exhibiting a coat of arms; "but I must say it's far prettier than the one we saw in Mrs. Van Dam's library."

"Runs mainly to red, doesn't it?" Shelby ventured, gravely considering the work.

"That's gules," explained Cora, learnedly; "the color of the field. Books of heraldry describe the arms as: 'Gules, two boars' heads displayed in chief and a mullet in base, sable; crest, a dexter arm, embowed, grasping a cimeter—'"

"I took that for a crumb-scraper," put in the governor, jocularly.

"The motto," went on Cora, soberly, "is, 'I achieve.' I think the purple of the mantling highly effective—purpure, that's called—which, taken with the red and black, would give a most romantic light to our hall in New Babylon if we put a window at the turn of the stair. Tomorrow morning I shall order a die made for my stationery."

"So this is ours," said Shelby. "Did the original owner acquire it in the Holy Wars, or was he a rich brewer who endowed a hospital?"

Cora reddened.

"He was Owen Shelby, a Welsh soldier of the Commonwealth."

"A near relation of mine?"

"You are undoubtedly his descendant. Of course I can't supply every trifling link—your people were so careless of their records; but there is no question in my mind that you are entitled to his arms, and you ought to be grateful to me for my pains."

"I am, I am," protested Shelby, with a chuckle. "But before the engraver begins work on the crumb-scraper and the prize pigs let me suggest that you add a detail which has been overlooked. I mean a bar sinister."

"Ross!"

He slipped his arm round her waist with a laugh.

"One of the state library people said that you were trailing the foreign Shelbys, and I glanced at your references. The fact I remember best is that Owen Shelby, late of Cromwell's Ironsides, died a bachelor."

She flung from him in stormy anger.

"I've twice been fool enough," she flashed, "to marry a man unable to appreciate me."

He winced. The reproach, more wanton than any she had ever framed, lashed him on the raw. The manner of his succession to Joe Hilliard's shoes had fostered an almost morbid solicitude for her well being which had not seldom over-topped his better judgment. If he had failed of his duty, it was not for lack of striving.

"I've tried, Cora," he answered bitterly.

Neither broached a formal reconciliation—such crude devices fell into disuse early in their marriage; but the man gave her social hours he could ill afford in the press of the closing session, and presently a tremendous event from the outside patched, if it could not heal, the breach. This was nothing less than the launching of Shelby's presidential boom.

Three factors contributed to this movement: the return of prosperity, the governor's personality, and the Boss. Shelby won his election in a midnight of universal hard times; his inauguration saw the dawn; the legislative session closed amidst a sunrise of splendid promise. By the deathless fallacy which credits or blames the ruling powers for everything, natural or supernatural, Shelby's party reaped abundantly where it had sown with niggard hand. The governor's personal deserts were more solid, the public recognizing his retarding ratchet as the cause of the machine's continence and the lowered tax-rate. Apparently the Legislature bore him no ill will for his curbing hand. A quiet word had issued from the Boss that the governor's vetoes must stand, and Shelby's one pet measure, the appointment of a commission to deal with the improvement of the canals, had passed both Houses by a vote which was almost non-partisan. A spontaneous demand seemed to well from the people that this faithful steward be sent higher.

But Shelby knew something of the rearing of that tenderest of plants in the political garden—the spontaneous demand. In the voice of the people he had so often read the will of the Boss. The inspired laudations of country editors, the resulting echoes in the city press, the interviews with the knowing ones who withheld their names, the genuine momentum lent by the easily impressed—all the covert workings of spontaneity were known to him from the days of apprenticeship at the Boss's feet. The method was transparent, the motive only was hazy; yet he divined the motive itself with sufficient accuracy. The Boss thought he knew too much. It is well to make your own governor, but to make him too well is ill. It was this one's drawback that he had passed the No Admittance sign of the workshop and got the trade secrets of the boss business at his finger ends. The pupil smiled sometimes when he recalled the first great rencounter with the master. The birch and frown no longer terrified. Evidently the Boss knew this, and failing the birch, dangled a prize.

What Shelby did not divine was the incentive force of pique. While the leader gave his smiling interviews to the reporters on the subject of the governor's vetoes, he had too often had to dissemble that his earliest information came from them. He did not resent the vetoes, if they made party capital; nor did he resent Shelby's popularity, for he liked him. The bitterness of the cup was that the ingrate took no pains to inquire whether he cared or not. It is true that in large questions Shelby had uniformly sought his counsel, and the session had been fairly prolific in legislation redounding to the party credit; but the governor's independence in the lesser matters attainted his loyalty. What the one man considered upholding the dignity of his office, the other interpreted as leze-majesty.

Shelby's attitude toward the presidential chit-chat was frankly human. Too modest to measure himself beside the greater successors of Washington, he yet knew himself to be as well equipped as many who had held the office; and, without troubling his sleep, determined that should the boss-made boom attain genuine popularity, it might drift where it would without hindrance from him. Precisely this occurred. The governor's practicality smoothed the way to his indorsement by men whose foremost interest was business rather than politics, and a banquet given him late in April by a great commercial organization of New York, which approved his policy of letting the city mind its own affairs, set him definitely in the race.

Throned in a gallery above the diners; courted by heroines of by-gone horse shows, the hem of whose garments she had never dreamed to touch; with the White House looming mistily through the sheen of silver and crystal and napery under tinted lights, Cora viewed the taking spectacle as a personal apotheosis. A silly periodical for "ladies" had recently printed an article about her which ascribed Shelby's making to herself, and she, in this rosy hour believing, looked upon her handiwork, and saw that it was tolerably good. Statesmen, diplomats, captains of industry, the smiling Boss—a very parliament of brains—did the governor honor, and the most famous after-dinner speaker in the land proclaimed him New York's favorite son.

To most of his listeners Shelby's reply seemed admirable. A morning paper called it "a little classic of straightforwardness"; but his king-maker aloft thought his bearing too simple by far. If he listened to her, he would tip his presidential lightning-rod more showily.