to me
the tremendous news of his engagement. He laughed, foolish with joy as
he told it, and I felt tingling in my arms that old boyish, brute
impulse to slay him for the wretched ease of his victory. But we were
men, so I thrust one of those rebellious arms in among the strands of
the creeper, where her own arm had once been, and laid the other on his
shoulder in all friendliness. This, while he rambled on of the bigness
of life, the great future before Arcady of the Little Country, the
importance of the _Argus_, which he had just founded, and the supreme
excellence of that splendid mechanism, the new Washington hand-press,
installed the week before.

His life was builded of these many interests, of her and himself and his
country and his town. In the fulness of his heart he even brought out
the latest _Argus_ and read parts from his obituary of Douglas, while I
stood stupidly striving to realize what I had long known must be true.

"A great man has fallen," he read, declaiming a little, as in our school
days. "Stephen A. Douglas is dead. The voice that so lately and
eloquently appealed to his countrymen is hushed in--"

How long he read is uncertain. But from moment to moment his tones would
call me back from visions, and I would vaguely hear that one was gone
who had warned his fellows against the pitfalls of political jealousy,
and bade all who loved their country band against those who would seek
to pluck a laurel from the wreath of our glorious confederacy.

But under visions I had made my resolve. Douglas was dead, but others
were living.

Two months before in a gray dawn, the walls of a fort in Charleston
Harbor had crumbled under fire from a score of rebel batteries. Now the
shots echoed in my ears with a new volume.

"Good luck, Solon--and good-by--I'm going 'on to Richmond.'"

"Oh, _that!_" said he, easily, "that will be over before you can get to
the front."

But I went, forthwith, and, triumphant lover though he was, the editor
of the _Little Arcady Argus_ was less than a prophet.

I went to the "little" war; and of her I carried, as I marched, an
ambrotype in a closed case, which I had obtained deviously. She smiled
in it, a little questioning, inciting smile, that seemed to lurk back in
her eyes rather than along her lips. It was the smile that had availed
to keep me firm in my vows of silence.

It was another picture I brought back five years later--the picture of a
young girl, not smiling b