Margaret started at the sound, and looked about for escape. She could not listen to that. Happening to glance upward, she saw a company of ladies and gentlemen in the balcony over the portico. Governor A---- was there, leaning on the railing and looking over. He caught her glance, and beckoned. Margaret immediately obeyed the summons, getting herself in hand all the way, and came out on the balcony with another face than that she had worn below. She had put on a smile; some good fairy had added a faint blush, and Miss Hamilton was presentable. The governor met her with a hearty smile and clasp of the hand. "I am glad to see you," he said. "Will you stand here, or take that seat Mr. Sinclair is offering you?" "Yes, sir," he exclaimed, as Margaret turned away, continuing his conversation with a gentleman beside him, "the English treatment of the Irish is a clear case of cussedness." "Our good chief magistrate is slightly idiomatic at times," remarked a lady near by. A poetess stood in the midst of a group of gentlemen, who looked at her, while she looked at the procession. "It is Arethusa, that bright stream," she said with soft eagerness, "Pursued and threatened at home, it has crept through shadowy ways, and leaped to light in a new land." {41} Margaret approached Mr. Sinclair, who sat apart, and who made room for her beside him. Even now she noticed the splendid beauty of this man in whom every physical attraction was perfected. Mr. Maurice Sinclair might have posed for a Jupiter; but an artist would scarcely have taken him for a model of the prince of the apostles. He was superbly made, with a haughty, self-conscious beauty; his full, bold eyes were of a light neutral tint impossible to describe, so transparent were they, so dazzling their lustre; and his face was delicately smooth and nobly-featured. One could scarcely regret that the long moustache curling away from his mouth, then drooping below his chin, and the thick hair pushed back from his forehead, were of silvery whiteness. It did not seem to be decay, but perfection. Mr. Sinclair used to say that his head had blossomed. He smiled as Miss Hamilton stepped slowly toward him, the smile of a man entirely pleased with himself. "Own now," he said, "that you are wishing to be Irish for the nonce, that you might feel the full effervescence of the occasion." She shook her head listlessly. Mr. Sinclair perceived that she needed to be amused. "See the governor wave his handkerchief!" he said. "That man has been born twice, once into Massachusetts, and the second time into all creation." She glanced at the object of his remarks, noting anew his short, rotund figure, his round head with all its crow's-nest of black ringlets, his prompt, earnest face that could be so kind. "There isn't a drop of mean blood in his veins," she said. "He is one of those rare men in whom feeling and principle go hand in hand."