“I asked you how you intended to serve my father, Mr. Bosworth, because you sent me this afternoon a letter in which you threatened me—you threatened me with my father’s ruin if I did not marry you. You would take advantage of my trouble and anxiety to force that question on me when I had answered it once and for all long ago. Before this stranger I want to tell you that you are a despicable coward, and that if you think you can humiliate me or my father or the state by such practices as you have resorted to you are very greatly mistaken. And further, Mr. Bosworth, if I find you interfering again in this matter, I shall print that letter you wrote me to-day in every newspaper in the state! Now, that is all I have to say to you, and I hope never to see you again.”
“Before you go, Mr. Bosworth,” said Griswold, “I wish to say that Miss Osborne has spoken of your conduct with altogether too much restraint. I shall add, on my own account, that if I find you meddling again in this Appleweight case, I shall first procure your removal from office, and after that I shall take the greatest pleasure in flogging you within an inch of your life. Now go!”
The two had dismissed him, and before Bosworth’s step died away in the hall, Griswold was running his eye over the papers.
“That man will do something nasty if he is clever enough to think of anything.”
“He’s a disgusting person,” said Barbara, touching her forehead with her handkerchief.
“He’s all of that,” remarked Griswold, as he retied the red tape round the packet of papers. “And now, before we leave we may as well face a serious proposition. Your father’s absence and this fiction we are maintaining that he is really here cannot be maintained for ever. I don’t want to trouble you, for you, of course, realize all this as keenly as I. But what do you suppose actually happened at New Orleans between your father and the governor of North Carolina?”
She leaned against her father’s desk, her hands lightly resting on its flat surface. She was wholly serene now, and she smiled and then laughed.
“It couldn’t have been what the governor of North Carolina said to the governor of South Carolina in the old story, for father is strongly opposed to drink of all kinds. And in the story——”
“I’ve forgotten where that story originated.”
“Well, it happened a long time ago, and nobody really knows the origin. But according to tradition, at the crisis of a great row between two governors, the ice was broken by the governor of North Carolina saying to the governor of South Carolina those shocking words about its being a long time between drinks. What makes the New Orleans incident so remarkable is that father and Governor Dangerfield have always been friends, though I never cared very much for the Dangerfields myself. The only tiffs they have had have been purely for effect. When father said that the people of North Carolina would never amount to anything so long as they fry their meat, it was only his joke with Governor Dangerfield—but it did make North Carolina awfully mad. And Jerry—she’s the governor’s daughter—refused to visit me last winter just on that account. Jerry Dangerfield’s a nice little girl, but she has no sense of humour.”