In the motor outside the scandalized Miss Letitia Pritchard, after a wait of an hour and five minutes, commented significantly and with a down-thrust inflection: “Well!” “Well, Cousin Letty,” said Marcia demurely. “Are you going to marry that young man, Marcia?” “How can I? He has refused me.” “Refused you!” gasped Miss Pritchard. “Precisely. I am a blighted maiden.” “Snumph!” sniffed Miss Pritchard. “Don’t you tell me!” “Must you hear it from him to believe it?” “Marcia Ames! I’ve watched that boy since you set your seal on him four years ago. I’ve seen him grow into a man, and fight his way wrong and right, and take his loss of you like a man and make a religion of it, and run his life by it, and if ever a chit of a girl ought to be proud of something too big and too good for her that she’s thrown away--Don’t you tell me, Marcia Ames! I--I don’t positively know what to say of such doings.” The little electric, equally scandalized, suddenly lost its head, rushed upon an unoffending hydrant, sheered off, made as if to climb the front steps of the bank, performed an impossible curve, chased two horrified and incredulous citizens (who had never seen Miss Pritchard under the influence of liquor before, and so reported to their wives when they got home) up against a railing, and finally resumed the road with a sickening lurch, all of which may have been due to the fact that the usually self-contained Miss Marcia Ames had abruptly buried her face in Miss Pritchard’s shoulder, and clutched at her blindly. “Say it again,” quavered Miss Ames, when the errant electric had squared away for home. “Say it again, Cousin Letty! I could not make him say it. And oh! how hard I tried.” “Land sakes! Then you are going to marry him!” exclaimed Miss Pritchard. “But he does not know it,” replied Marcia, suddenly demure. CHAPTER XV HAD any one informed Governor Martin Embree that Miss Marcia Ames was again embellishing Fenchester society, he would have dismissed the matter as of no political moment. That is to say, of no importance whatsoever. Politics was now the exclusive and feverish preoccupation of “Smiling Mart” Embree’s days and nights, “Aut Senatus aut nullus” the motive guiding his every action. Miss Ames was not even a voter, having no residence in the State. Yet, by those devious ways in which women work and quite as unknown to herself as to Martin Embree, she was preparing a pitfall for the aspiring feet of Centralia’s most bounteous smiler.