Summer leaped a hotbed growth from spring, and Cora Shelby, tiring of golf, the country club, and Albany's now mild pastimes, took herself off for a round of fashionable resorts with Mrs. Tommy Kidder. The governor had other occupations. So far as a man could do such a thing, he put his presidential chances out of mind and bent his energies upon a study of the canal problem, whose solving he was ambitious to make the monument of his administration. As a legislator he had been recognized as an authority upon this his hobby; but the knowledge of the assemblyman was shallow beside that of the governor, who asked no fairer laurel than to link his name with the regenerated Erie Canal as the second Clinton had associated his name with its beginnings.

Throughout the languid heated term whose official calm only the occasional request of a fellow governor for requisition papers disturbed, Shelby plodded over the bewildered mass of estimates, maps, and mazy statistics which his special committee was accumulating. A more brilliant man doubtless would have left much of this arid drudgery to subordinates, contenting himself with the sum of things, without a close scrutiny of detail; but this was never Shelby's way. When he mastered a subject it was his blood and bones, and his passion for the Ditch transmuted its story, howsoever told, into stuff that splendid dreams are made on and modern empires built.

Those arduous months were the happiest he had known. He toiled mightily, but he wrought at a labor of love, while his leisure hours fostered friendships as novel as they were attractive. Cora Shelby's campaign of the watering-places had not embraced Milicent, and the girl returned from school in June to find her mother already gone. She dutifully made known her arrival in Albany, and in time deciphered from a patchouli-scented scrawl postmarked "Bar Harbor" that Albany was an excellent spot for her to remain.

"She says that summer hotels are no places for young girls," Milicent told her stepfather. "Why then does mamma care about them?"

The governor was nonplussed: but he quietly set himself to make Albany tolerable for this astonishing young person, yet scant of seventeen, who had suddenly flowered into the outward semblance of a woman. He devised excursions on the river and pilgrimages to historic spots about the city and the countryside, acquiring strange antiquarian lore of the Schuyler house, the Van Rensselaer mansion, and the Vanderheyden Palace, and, more curious still, a perception of his deep capacity for affection. This child of the Hilliards' better selves, with her father's frankness, her mother's earlier beauty, and with a winsomeness all her own, awoke his slumbering instinct of fatherhood.

The wholesome new relation quickened his insight amazingly. He divined that however much the girl might care for these wayside rambles with him, her youth must still crave youth, and in this strait he turned to Mrs. Van Dam, who forthwith became Milicent's captive, too, and a fairy godmother into the bargain. So Shelby came much to frequent a vine-screened upper veranda off Mrs. Van Dam's library, where she was fond of serving coffee after dinner, and one could dip down over the red roofs and tree-tops to the stripling Hudson changing its coat of many colors in the sunset. As this corner was a haunt of Canon North's, also, it fell out that a friendship sprang up between the men which strengthened into intimacy. Shelby had never dreamed of making friends with a clergyman. The sectarian college had put him out of joint with priestery. But North was in a class by himself. He had no sacerdotal air or jargon—that negative virtue was his earliest passport; and he was from crown to sole a robust manly man. The governor took to dropping into the canon's book-lined study near the cathedral after office hours, and North would come to the executive mansion and smoke half the night away; for the canon was a judge of tobacco no less than men. Not once in their intercourse did he mention church-going or creeds; he did not "talk religion." Yet, whatever the canon's religion was, Shelby was aware that he lived it. The air was full of little stories of his helpfulness of the sort people told of a man North once alluded to as "Saint" Phillips Brooks.

Milicent went to the Catskills late in August as the guest of a school friend, and after a day or two of novel loneliness, the governor decided to carry out a recently formed plan for supplementing the work of his committee with a personal inspection of a part of the canal system. As it seemed to him that he could get at the best results by quiet means, his journey was presented to the press in the light of a business trip to his old home. For forty-eight hours his leisurely progress with his private secretary escaped remark. Then the newspapers upset his apple-cart. Shelby had become too interesting a figure for the rÔle of Haroun-al-Raschid, and the paragraphers rang astonishing changes on his adventures at the few points where he had succeeded in making observations unrecognized. What he saw thereafter was accompanied by the click of cameras and the fatuity of local bigwigs brimming with eagerness to tie their fortunes to the car of the coming man.

At New Babylon, where he became the guest of the Hon. Seneca Bowers, the minute espionage upon his doings ceased, and Shelby felt less a personage than at any time since his inauguration. The town was proud of him, but too faithful to its ancestral reserve to tell him so. People who had called him "Ross" all his days addressed him in this fashion still; and the Widow Weatherwax calmly imposed an audience in the matter of her last will and testament, which the new-fledged lawyer, William Irons, had bungled, and spiced the renewal of their relations with her old-time candor and a full chronicle of the past, present, and probable scandal of the county. In little ways, however, the governor perceived what close-mouthed Tuscarora really felt. They had hung a crayon portrait of him in the court-house, and the Pioneer Association, which was about to hold its annual picnic beside Ontario, asked him to deliver the address.

Shelby accepted the invitation, and, saturated as he was with the homespun history of his county, excelled himself. But he did something more than retell a familiar tale. A product of this life, he nevertheless saw it from the outside and in its wide relations, and the canal-begotten civilization, which was his immediate theme, led irresistibly to the vast economic problem that lay near his heart, and to a suddenly formulated plan for its solution. By one of those inspirations of the moment which public speakers know, yet dare not count upon, the vexing details of his summer's drudgery shifted and rearranged themselves into a coherent pattern and policy whose fulfilment should place the historic waterway, not merely abreast of the age, but bulwarked for the future. It was a significant utterance which carried far. Shelby could give no copies of his speech to the press, since the speech had largely shaped itself in the making; but the correspondents who covered what had promised to be a purely bucolic assignment, were not slow in seeing their error and retrieving it. What the Tuscarora pioneers and their descendants heard, the whole state read; and the discerning perceived that, wherever the party, the party machine, or the party boss might stand, the governor had scaled the high plateau of statesmanship, where public opinion is less catered to than led.

Late in the afternoon Shelby shook the last brown hand in the serpentine line of country people which coiled in and out the stuffy parlor of the Lakeview Inn, and cutting loose from the reception committee under cover of a headache, slipped away into the trees. The fringe of the wood was defaced with the litter of picnickers, and smelt of lunch; the din of the agents for new-fangled reapers and ploughs, whose gaudy paint was doubly garish against the sober background, had routed the squirrels and birds; but the remoter paths held only silent lovers, and the camp-ground, where the Widow Weatherwax had mouthed and played the prophet, stripped of its tents, its zealots, its wavering torchlights, was full of wholesome sunlight and forest peace.

The spot stirred ghosts, and the governor turned to the murmuring shore with its gentle mimicry of ocean. Half sheltered by a clump of sumach sat a woman upon a bit of driftwood and flung pebbles in the lake. He stared, and then went slowly down to her.

"Ruth," he said, "you here!"

"Your Excellency startled me."

Her banter puzzled him, but the handclasp was warm.

"Forget my office," he petitioned.

"After your tremendous speech to-day? You were his Excellency the governor of New York with that, and I was properly impressed. It struck me that you would make a benevolent czar."

"Are you mocking me?"

"God forbid, your Excellency!"

"I'd rather be plain Shelby," he said, studying her profile. "I'm glad you heard me—glad that you liked it. It was sincere, and you value sincerity. But I had no notion that you were listening. I supposed you somewhere with the fashionables."

"I reached home yesterday, and came at once to my lake cottage. I heard that you were to speak, and braved the picnic to hear you. I trust you appreciate the sacrifice."

"And—your husband? Is he here too?"

Ruth flung a pebble.

"I believe he's addressing a woman suffrage convention in Chicago to-day." She gave him a lazy glance. "And Mrs. Shelby—is she here?"

"She's in Saratoga, I believe."

"Belief again? We really ought to read the papers."

He tried to search her face, but the pebble-throwing prevented. The Widow Weatherwax had expatiated on the topic of Mrs. Bernard Graves's unhappiness, with tedious variations on the saw about marrying in haste to repent at leisure. He wondered—he scarce knew what. She drew him with all the old attraction, but an elusive something had vanished. He guessed that it was the essence of youth, though the form lingered.

"Are you happy, Ruth?" he asked abruptly.

She looked him in the eyes, and laughed.

"That reminds me of your unofficial self," she said. "You never could invent small talk for the feminine mind."

"You were never the kind of woman who wanted it."

"I better appreciate its uses nowadays. It conceals either the absence or presence of thought. Bless me! there's an epigram. But I'm afraid it's merely an echo of Voltaire."

He was not listening. A midsummer madness rioted in his brain.

"But are you happy?"

"Small talk, small talk," she insisted. "See how that yacht's sails take the sun. Isn't the water a splendid sapphire? Do you like to fish? Do you prefer Tennyson or Browning? Meredith or Hardy? Isn't it warm? Isn't it cool?"

"But are you?"

She rose and faced him with strange eyes.

"What do you want?"

"Want," he repeated mechanically, rising too.

"Why have you come here in your pomp of governorship and promise of greater things to harass me?"

"Harass you, Ruth! If you knew—"

"Know? I know too much. I'm unlearning things now. That's the key to happiness—forgetting. And here come you, as you used to come, an untamed, masterful force—that's what you are, a force!—and instead of forgetting you ask me to remember. What is it you're really seeking in this probing of my happiness? What must you be told?"

"Nothing." With the revelation of the flaw in her armor he conquered self. "I know—God help me!—I know."