The wholesome new relation quickened his insight amazingly. He divined that however much the girl might care for these wayside rambles with him, her youth must still crave youth, and in this strait he turned to Mrs. Van Dam, who forthwith became Milicent's captive, too, and a fairy godmother into the bargain. So Shelby came much to frequent a vine-screened upper veranda off Mrs. Van Dam's library, where she was fond of serving coffee after dinner, and one could dip down over the red roofs and tree-tops to the stripling Hudson changing its coat of many colors in the sunset. As this corner was a haunt of Canon North's, also, it fell out that a friendship sprang up between the men which strengthened into intimacy. Shelby had never dreamed of making friends with a clergyman. The sectarian college had put him out of joint with priestery. But North was in a class by himself. He had no sacerdotal air or jargon--that negative virtue was his earliest passport; and he was from crown to sole a robust manly man. The governor took to dropping into the canon's book-lined study near the cathedral after office hours, and North would come to the executive mansion and smoke half the night away; for the canon was a judge of tobacco no less than men. Not once in their intercourse did he mention church-going or creeds; he did not "talk religion." Yet, whatever the canon's religion was, Shelby was aware that he lived it. The air was full of little stories of his helpfulness of the sort people told of a man North once alluded to as "Saint" Phillips Brooks. Milicent went to the Catskills late in August as the guest of a school friend, and after a day or two of novel loneliness, the governor decided to carry out a recently formed plan for supplementing the work of his committee with a personal inspection of a part of the canal system. As it seemed to him that he could get at the best results by quiet means, his journey was presented to the press in the light of a business trip to his old home. For forty-eight hours his leisurely progress with his private secretary escaped remark. Then the newspapers upset his apple-cart. Shelby had become too interesting a figure for the role of Haroun-al-Raschid, and the paragraphers rang astonishing changes on his adventures at the few points where he had succeeded in making observations unrecognized. What he saw thereafter was accompanied by the click of cameras and the fatuity of local bigwigs brimming with eagerness to tie their fortunes to the car of the coming man.