Page:Roads of Destiny (1909).djvu/272

 trickled in through the open door from the other departments—a dull tinkling crash from the treasurer’s office adjoining, as a clerk tossed a bag of silver to the floor of the vault—the vague, intermittent clatter of a dilatory typewriter—a dull tapping from the state geologist’s quarters as if some woodpecker had flown in to bore for his prey in the cool of the massive building—and then a faint rustle and the light shuffling of the well-worn shoes along the hall, the sounds ceasing at the door toward which the commissioner’s lethargic back was presented. Following this, the sound of a gentle voice speaking words unintelligible to the commissioner’s somewhat dormant comprehension, but giving evidence of bewilderment and hesitation.

The voice was feminine; the commissioner was of the race of cavaliers who make salaam before the trail of a skirt without considering the quality of its cloth.

There stood in the door a faded woman, one of the numerous sisterhood of the unhappy. She was dressed all in black—poverty’s perpetual mourning for lost joys. Her face had the contours of twenty and the lines of forty. She may have lived that intervening score of years in a twelvemonth. There was about her yet an aurum of indignant, unappeased, protesting youth that shone faintly through the premature veil of unearned decline.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” said the commissioner, gaining his feet to the accompaniment of a great creaking and sliding of his chair.

“Are you the governor, sir?” asked the vision of melancholy.