Eliot Beekman did not answer at once, but hung his head under the girl's scrutinising gaze. She looked very beautiful, irresistibly beautiful to him pleading there, and for a moment he came perilously near to wavering in his purpose. He would have liked to have taken her in his arms, to have uttered the one word of all others that she wished to hear and to have sent her home happy. But, hard as it was to deny her, he knew from the first that it was impossible to grant her request.
"No, Leslie, I can't," he told her at last.
"Look at me!" she cried, now changing her tactics. "I haven't slept, I haven't eaten! Have you no pity for me—if not for him?"
"But, Leslie, you're asking me to commit a crime!"
"Just a stroke of the pen, dear, and my father will be free," she went on, half sobbing, half smiling. "It's his last chance—my last chance—surely you can't, you won't refuse me this."
Then followed a scene that lived in Beekman's memory for ever after—the memory of a woman, the woman he loved, crawling after him on her knees, pleading, almost writhing in agony, imploring him to do this impossible thing—a thing that, were it not for his conscience, was so ridiculously easy: merely the exercising of the authority vested in him, and solely in him, and thus save the father of the woman he loved from serving a term of ten years at hard labour in the State's Prison.
"Why was I ever Governor!" burst out Beekman.
"I'll tell you why," said Wilkinson, striding suddenly into the room. "It's because I made you Governor, that's why! I—I bought you the job—I——"
"You?" ejaculated Beekman.