Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/116

 to the State-house. They're having trouble down at Middleburg, and I'll have to handle it in the Governor's absence. I'm afraid I'll not be back till late."

"Yes," she said.

He had reached out as if to open the cigar-box. He upset the typewritten pages. They slid with a rustle to the floor and scattered widely—assisted by his clumsy effort to catch them. "There!" he said, disgustedly.

"Let me, father." She crossed the room with a graceful quickness and knelt among the papers in a whorl of white skirts. He looked down at her hands as she gathered up the pages, and he saw that her ring was gone—a little single-ruby ring that her dead mother had given her.

He began at once to maneuver against that conspiracy of events as he had begun to maneuver against the menace from Middleburg. And his tactics in these two cases were typical of the man and his methods. They can be more briefly reported and more readily understood than the more complicated intrigues of some of his national manipulations, but they were just as astute and subtle in miniature as any of his later strategies have been in the large.

"I'm growing old," he said. "It makes me dizzy to stoop." He began to pace up and down the room