I needn't say that I'm glad to see you, Miss Winter," he began, with a
friendly smile. "Ned has told me so much about you the past month I'd
made up my mind to join the Abolitionists, and apply for a secretaryship
to the Senator if I couldn't manage it any other way."

"And you'll be content to resume a normal life after to-day?"

She looked into his eyes with mischievous challenge. She had recovered
her poise.

He laughed, and a shadow suddenly swept his face:

"I wonder, Miss Winter, if any of us will live a normal life after
to-day?"

"You've seen the Rail-splitter, our new President?"

"No, I didn't wait in the Senate Chamber. I came out here to make sure
of my seat beside you----"

"To hear every word of the Inaugural, of course," Betty broke in.

"Yes, of course----" he paused and the faintest suggestion of a smile
flickered about the corners of his eyes. "Ned told me you had three good
seats. I am anxious to hear what he says--but more anxious to see him
when he says it. I can read his Inaugural, but I want to see the soul of
the man behind its conventional phrases----"

"He'll use conventional phrases?"

"Certainly. They all do. But no man ever came to the Presidential chair
with as little confidence back of him. The Abolitionists have already
begun to denounce him before he has taken the oath of office. The rank
and file of the party that elected him are not Abolitionists and never
for a moment believed that the Southern people were in earnest when they
threatened Secession during the campaign. We thought it bluff. To say
that the whole North and West is panic-stricken is the simple truth.

"Horace Greeley and the _Tribune_ are for Secession.

"'Let our erring sisters go!' the editor tells the millions who hang on
his words as the oracle of heaven.

"The North has been talking Secession for thirty years, and now that the
South is doing what they've been threatening, we wake up and try to
persuade ourselves that no such right exists in a sovereign state. Yet
we all know that Great Britain surrendered to the thirteen colonies as
sovereign states and named each one of them in her articles of surrender
and our treaty of peace. We know that there never would have been a
Constitution or a Union if the men who drew it and created the Union had
dared to question the right of either of these sovereign states to
withdraw when they wished. They didn't dare to raise the question. They
left it for their child