"Dan Baldromma suspects me, and is having me watched."
Stowell was startled and ashamed. Where had his head been that he had not thought of this before? He had got up from his desk and was looking vacantly out of the window when he became aware that the Governor's big blue landau was drawing up in the street below.
At the next moment there was a light step on the stairs, and at the next the door of his room was opened by his young clerk, and through the doorway came someone who was like a vision from a thousand of his dreams, but now grown in her stately height out of the beauty of a bewitching girl into the full bloom of womanly loveliness.
It was Fenella Stanley.
II
"You wouldn't come to see me, so I've come to see you."
Stowell never knew what answer he made when he took her outstretched hand; but after a moment he said,
"You know my friend Gell?"
"Indeed I do .... And how's Isabella? .... And Adelaide? .... And Verbena?"
While Fenella was talking to Gell, Stowell had time to look at her. She was the most beautiful woman in the world! Those dark eyes, beaming with bluish opal; those lips like an opening rose; that spacious forehead, with its brown hair shot with gold—they had not told him the half.