Although the event was to be deferred till late February, as the crowning glory of the season which Lent would close, Cora's plans were on foot by Thanksgiving Day. Among her earliest preliminaries was the enlisting of Mrs. Van Dam, whose friendship for Milicent she had determined to exploit as soon as she learned of its existence. This was not difficult. Of the wisdom of the thing Mrs. Van Dam said nothing,--she had had her fill of advising Mrs. Shelby,--but her sympathy for Milicent was keen, and it drew her into a rather distasteful share in Cora's programme, in the hope of lessening the girl's ordeal. Where Mrs. Teunis Van Dam led, Albany naturally followed; and with Albany subdued, Cora directed her conquering march toward other worlds. In the year of her publicity she had, through Mrs. Tommy Kidder and other agencies, brushed here and there at the rim of the magic inner circle of metropolitan society, for every inch of which she now encroached an ell. Shelby gained his first knowledge of the astonishing extent of his wife's acquaintance when he scanned the invitation list of a thousand names, and was told by the military secretary that New York's quota was coming by special train. About five o'clock on the evening of the ball, the governor came home fagged and depressed. Aside from canal reform, still drifting through seas of talk, the legislative session presented several insistent public questions which seemed to have imposed their cumulative worry on his morning hours; later had come an acrimonious hearing over the removal of an incompetent district attorney; then a quarter-hour's fencing with the press correspondents, who wanted to know things which it was inexpedient to tell; and, finally, a rasping conference with the Boss, who, using the ball as a cover for one of his rare pilgrimages to Albany, had, throughout the day, held levee in his hotel parlors with such vogue that at moments both Senate and Assembly all but lacked a quorum. Mrs. Tommy Kidder's brougham blocked the porte-cochere as Shelby mounted the steps of the executive mansion, and at the door he met the volatile lady herself. "I've been watching the workmen give the finishing touch, governor," she gushed. "You are about to set foot in fairyland." Shelby put her in her carriage, and entered the house. It did not seem fairylike. Only a dim light shone here and there through the dusk, and the floors were not yet clear of the rubbish of the decorators. From one of the smaller rooms came the sound of Handsome Ludlow's voice. He too, apparently, had been watching the finishing touch. The governor passed on to his own apartments in quest of peace. It was a vain search. His quarters had been invaded and curtailed for the event, and the corner left him was confused and forlorn. He lit a cigar, smoked a brief moment, heard a feminine cough on the farther side of a door leading to one of the rooms from which some guest had dispossessed him, and desisted.