"Just wanted you to sign this, girlie."
Leslie glanced at it cursorily, saw that it was what she believed it to be—a means of payment to Leech, and signing, passed it over without looking at her father. He stood for an instant at the door.
"Newton has come up to see you," he said. "The Governor is getting kind of lonely up in Albany—he can hardly wait to get a Mrs. Governor up there."
Leslie drew her hand across her face.
"Please tell Mr. Leech," she answered, "that I'm ill. I can't possibly see him to-day—no," she persisted, "don't ask me—not to-day." She pushed her father playfully from the room and once more locked the door. Then she went back to the window and read the printed case of the People versus Peter V. Wilkinson until the shadows deepened into darkness.
"It's all so clear now," she sighed. "How could they have acquitted him? How could Eliot Beekman have pardoned him, even if he had wanted to? Oh, he's guilty, guilty, guilty!"
Completely exhausted, Leslie laid down the volume and threw herself upon the bed, where she lay until the early morning sunlight peered in through the windows. Throughout the long night she had not closed her eyes, but lay there thinking, planning, some way out of it all. The morning found her resolved upon one point: She would never marry the man her father wanted her to marry.
And so it happened that some weeks later Governor Leech, looking down upon her, his face suddenly gone pale, his breath coming short, protested:
"But, Leslie, you can't mean it. Don't you know that I've held you in my arms, that my kisses are on your lips! Those made you mine. You've promised, your eyes have answered mine, you belong to me just as much as though—by heaven! if you don't belong to me for any other reason, you belong to me because I've earned you! Look what I did for your father—what I did for you!"
"You've been paid enough," she answered stubbornly. "I've paid you out of the money in my hands. Oh, don't stare! I know—I know...." She paused a moment, her face flushing, her breath coming fast. "Governor Leech," she resumed, "while my father was in danger I could think of nothing but to save him; but now that strain, that terrific strain is over, and I have come to my senses. I can't even think of you, much less marry you with this taint on you. Yes, I broke my promise to you, it is true, but I had to, don't you see?" She lifted her head proudly, and then added: "I had to for the reason that I am just beginning to find out that I'm a woman, and that you, Governor—you are not—a man."