“You would have come too late,” she said in that same enigmatic undertone.
“Anice.”
There was a world of pain in his appeal, yet she disregarded it; and, with face averted, hurried on:
“Would you care for—for the love of a girl who made you wait until you could buy her with fame and an income? Do I care for the love of a man who holds that love so cheaply he must accompany its gift with a Governorship title——?”
“And now,” she observed, some minutes later, as she strove to rearrange her tumbled crown of rust-colored hair before the tiny patch of office mirror, “and now, if you can be sensible for just a little while, we’ll go back to the convention. And I’ll explain to you about those letters. The anonymous ones.”
“It’s all right. I don’t have to be told. I——”
“But I have to tell you. That’s the worst of being a girl.”
The crowd had trooped back into the Convention Hall. Gerald Conover had not been at the earlier session, but now, his sallow face flushed with liquor, he sat silent and dull-eyed among a party of noisy young satellites, in one of the dingy, chicken-coop boxes at the side of the stage.
He had evidently been drinking hard. In fact, since his wife’s visit to Granite, the previous week, the youngster had seldom if ever been wholly sober. Nor was his habitual apathy all due to drink.
The Conover machine, having greased the wheels and oiled the cogs, did not propose to lose any time in running its Juggernaut over the young reformer who had dared to brave an entrenched and ruthless organization. Amid a hullabaloo Bourke called the conference to order, ending his formula with the equally perfunctory request: