nner with Miss Betty to-night?" Ned asked in friendly
tones.

"Yes, I'm going with her to the White House," was the cold reply.

"I'm leaving in an hour. Don't you think it's foolish for two brothers
who have been what you and I have been to each other to part like this?
We may not see one another again."

John hesitated and then slowly slipped his arm around the younger man,
holding him in silence. When his voice was steady he said:

"Forgive me, Boy. I was blind with anger. It meant so much to me. But
we'll face it. We'll have to fight it out--as God gives us wisdom to see
the right----"

Ned's hand found his, and clasped it firmly:

"As God gives us to see the right, John--Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Boy,--it's hard to say it!"

They clung to each other for a moment and slowly drew apart as the
shadows of the soft spring night deepened.

CHAPTER VIII

THE TRIAL BY FIRE

The troops transformed Washington from a lazy Southern town of sixty
thousand inhabitants into an armed fortress of the frontier, swarming
with a quarter of a million excited men and women. Soldiers thronged the
streets and sidewalks and sprawled over every inch of greensward, their
uniforms of every cut and color on which the sun of heaven had shone
during the past two hundred years of history.

When the tumult and the shouts of departing regiments had died away from
the home towns in the North and the flags that were flying from every
house had begun to fade under the hot rays of the advancing summer, the
patriotic orators and editors began to demand of their President why his
grand army of seventy-five thousand lingered at the Capital. When he
mildly suggested the necessity of drilling, equipping and properly
arming them he was laughed at by the wise, and scoffed at as a coward by
the brave.

Mutterings of discontent grew deeper and more threatening. They demanded
a short, sharp, decisive campaign. Let the army wheel into line, march
straight into Richmond, take Jefferson Davis a prisoner, hang him and a
few leaders of the "rebellion," and the trouble would be over. This
demand became at length the maddened cry of a mob:

"On to Richmond!"

Every demagogue howled it. Every newspaper repeated it. As city after
city, and State after State took up the cry, the pressure on the man at
the helm of Government became resistless. It was a political necessity
to fight a battle and fight at once or lose control of the people he had
been