"Why, sir, you have been mooning around these fortifications quite as though they had made up your life and their ruins stood for your broken purposes; whereas for fifteen years you have been Governor of the Islands and my sister tells me you are a good man. Surely, then, your real life has lain in the justice you have done, the wrongs you have righted, the trust you have built up in the people's hearts, and not in these decaying walls which no enemy ever threatened in your time nor for a hundred years before you came." But again the Commandant shook his head. "I say nothing of the first few years," he answered slowly. "I liked the people and I tried to do justice. But all that has passed out of my control. The Lord Proprietor takes everything into his own hands." "Still on the Council--" she urged. "I am no longer a member of the Council." "You resigned? Why?" "Because I saw that Sir Caesar was bent on humiliating me; and he had the power." Vashti prised at a loose stone from the wall with the point of her sunshade. "I have read somewhere," she said, after a pause, "that no wise man should avoid being a magistrate, because it is wrong to refuse help to those who need it, and equally wrong to stand aside and let worse men govern ill." "The Lord Proprietor does not govern ill. He likes his own way; but he is a just man--" The Commandant hesitated and paused. "A just man until you happen to thwart him. Is that what you were going to say?" "No," he answered, smiling. "I was about to say that once or twice I have found him something less than fair to me. To others--" But here he paused again, remembering that morning's conversation on the hill.