"Stop!" cried Morehead, alarmed lest he should betray to her their political secret. "I mean I gave him my daughter," corrected the father, "everything I had." Morehead stared at them a moment from under knitted brows. Presently he said: "Peter, I'd send Leslie to him. This letter is only tentative." "It's a refusal," gasped Wilkinson, hopelessly. "It's a denial to me," explained Colonel Morehead. "But wait until he sees her! He'll have something different to say to her, I know." And so it happened that the following day Leslie Wilkinson arrived at Albany to interview her betrothed on her father's behalf. "I came to talk to you, Eliot, about my father," she began. Beekman swayed in his chair. His eyes seemed sunken in his head, and his head ached from weariness and lack of sleep. "Yes, Leslie," he said. "Colonel Morehead didn't--couldn't understand what your letter meant, so I came to see." "It means that I can't pardon your father, Leslie," he told her with great difficulty. "Why not?" "Because your father is guilty----" "Eliot!" she cried, leaping back with flashing eyes. "But I must speak the truth, Leslie," said the Governor, "and that's the truth." There was a silence that lapsed into minutes. Beekman was the first to break it. "Unfortunately for us all," he said, "I'm sworn to do my duty--I don't know that it makes much difference about my being sworn--I'd have to do it anyway." "You defended him," she said with sudden spirit. "You believed him innocent then--you said so a thousand times." "I defended him below," he returned, "because it was my duty to defend him. I had never seen any other side of the case then; but now I know I was wrong. He's guilty, deliberately guilty, wofully guilty...." "Eliot, must I remind you that you are speaking of my father! Have I no right, no influence, no claim upon you?" she rattled on breathlessly. "Yes, you have a claim upon me," he said, eyeing her sternly. "Your influence is of the best, Leslie, and it is your right, your duty to claim, to demand of me that I shall do my duty in this as in all things. If I were false in this, I would be false to you." But Leslie could not see things in his light, bent as she was on obtaining her father's pardon. "You pardoned Giles Ilingsworth?" she went on; "and now you won't...." "Yes, I pardoned Giles Ilingsworth," he admitted. "A murderer!" she blazed forth. "I pardoned him because he was innocent," he insisted. "And you can't pardon my father?" Eliot Beekman did not answer at once, but hung his head under the girl's scrutinising gaze. She looked very beautiful, irresistibly beautiful to him pleading there, and for a moment he came perilously near to wavering in his purpose. He would have liked to have taken her in his arms, to have uttered the one word of all others that she wished to hear and to have sent her home happy. But, hard as it was to deny her, he knew from the first that it was impossible to grant her request.