le.
And yet, for the sake of a narrow point, you are ready, if the need
arises, to embark on a war which must be bloody and long, which must
stir the deeps of bitterness, and which in all likelihood will achieve
nothing. Are you entirely resolved?"

Lincoln's sad eyes rested on the other. "I am entirely resolved. I
have been set here to decide for the people according to the best of my
talents, and the Almighty has shown me no other road."

Seward held out his hand.

"Then, by God, you must be right. You are the bravest man in this land,
sir, and I will follow you to the other side of perdition."

III

The time is two years later--a warm evening in early May. There had been
no rain for a week in Washington, and the President, who had ridden in
from his summer quarters in the Soldiers' Home, had his trousers grey
with dust from the knees down. He had come round to the War Department,
from which in these days he was never long absent, and found the
Secretary for War busy as usual at his high desk. There had been
the shortest of greetings, and, while Lincoln turned over the last
telegrams, Stanton wrote steadily.

Stanton had changed much since the night in the Springfield store. A
square beard, streaked with grey, covered his chin, and his face had
grown heavier. There were big pouches below the short-sighted eyes, and
deep lines on each side of his short shaven upper lip. His skin had an
unheathly pallor, like that of one who works late and has little
fresh air. The mouth, always obstinate, was now moulded into a settled
grimness. The ploughs of war had made deep furrows on his soul.

Lincoln, too, had altered. He had got a stoop in his shoulders as if
his back carried a burden. A beard had been suffered to grow in a ragged
fringe about his jaw and cheeks, and there were silver threads in it.
His whole face seemed to have been pinched and hammered together, so
that it looked like a mask of pale bronze--a death mask, for it was hard
to believe that blood ran below that dry tegument. But the chief change
was in his eyes. They had lost the alertness they once possessed, and
had become pits of brooding shade, infinitely kind, infinitely patient,
infinitely melancholy.

Yet there was a sort of weary peace in the face, and there was still
humour in the puckered mouth and even in the sad eyes. He looked less
harassed than the Secretary for War. He drew a small book from his
pocket, at which the other glanced malevolen