“I’d rather not, Morris, but I have promised you, and it shall be so.”
The ceremony of the inauguration was the most elaborate seen at Albany in years.
Tammany came to the capital thirty thousand strong, and thirty thousand strong they marched through the streets, with their shining silk hats glistening in the sun and their lusty throats shouting for their leader. They had voted the ticket faithfully, and sometimes too often the same day, unkind critics had said, in the years of the past, but for the first time in generations they had placed a full-fledged Grand Sachem of their own Great Wigwam in the Governor’s chair, and they made the welkin ring. In the joy of their faces, the steady hoof-beat of their big feet on the pavement and the stalwart pride with which they marched, one saw the secret of their victory. They were in dead earnest. Politics was the breath they breathed and the blood that fed their hearts.
King felt the contagion of their loyalty and enthusiasm, and his inaugural address was inspired and inspiring.
He placed Ruth and the children in choice seats near the speaker’s stand, and in every movement of his body, every word and accent, from the moment he appeared till the last shout of his victorious henchmen died away, he was conscious of her presence.
She could feel the intensity of his powerful will pressing upon her in this triumph he was deliberately laying at her feet.
When the ceremonies were over, and his address was being flashed over a thousand wires, he sent the children for a drive, and showed Ruth over the stately executive mansion. He knew the hour was propitious, and he had planned to make a desperate attempt to win some sort of promise from her for their future.
“Now, Ruth,” he said, softly, “sit here on this sofa by the open fire. We will be alone for awhile. I’ve something to show you.”
His face was still aglow from the excitement of his triumph. He drew from his inner pocket an official envelope tied with a piece of ribbon.
She leaned over with interest, thinking he was going to read to her some scheme of legislation on which he had been at work.