“I have no doubt in the world that the explanation you gave the newspapers is the truth of the matter. Your father must be absent a great deal—it is part of a governor’s business to keep in motion. But we may as well face the fact that his absence just now is most embarrassing. This Appleweight matter has reached a crisis, and a failure to handle it properly may injure your father’s future as a public man. If you will pardon me, I would suggest that there must be some one whom you can take into your confidence—some friend, some one in your father’s administration that you can rely on?”
“Yes; father has many friends; but I cannot consider acknowledging to any one that father has disappeared when such a matter as this Appleweight case is an issue through the state. No; I have thought of every one this afternoon. It would be a painful thing for his best friends to know what is—what seems to be the truth.” Her voice wavered a little, but she was brave, and he was aware that she straightened herself in her chair, and, when wayward gleams of light fell upon her face, that her lips were set resolutely.
“You saw the attorney-general this morning,” she went on. “As you suggested, he would naturally be the one to whom I should turn, but I cannot do it. I—there is a reason”—and she faltered a moment—“there are reasons why I cannot appeal to Mr. Bosworth at this time.”
She shrugged her shoulders as though throwing off a disagreeable topic, and he saw that there was nothing more to be said on this point. His heart-beats quickened as he realized that she was appealing to him; that, though he was only the most casual acquaintance, she trusted him. It was a dictum of his, learned in his study and practice of the law, that issues must be met as they offer—not as the practitioner would prefer to have them, but as they occur; and here was a condition of affairs that must be met promptly if the unaccountable absence of the governor was to be robbed of its embarrassing significance.
As he pondered for a moment, a messenger rode into the grounds, and Miss Osborne slipped away and met the boy at the steps. She came back and opened a telegram, reading the message at one of the windows. An indignant exclamation escaped her, and she crumpled the paper in her hand.
“The impudence of it!” she exclaimed. He had risen, and she now turned to him with anger and scorn deepening her beautiful colour. Her breath came quickly; her head was lifted imperiously; her lips quivered slightly as she spoke.
“This is from Governor Dangerfield. Can you imagine a man of any character or decency sending such a message to the governor of another state?”
She watched him as he read:
Raleigh, N. C.
The Honourable Charles Osborne,
Governor of South Carolina,
Columbia, S. C.: