ow. James Thorold met his look with sombre sorrow.
"Don't think I've had no punishment," he said. "Remember that I loved
Judge Adams. And I loved Abraham Lincoln."

"Oh, no, no!" The boy's choked utterance came in protest. "If you'd
really cared for them you wouldn't have failed them."

"I have prayed," his father said, "that you may never know the grief of
having failed the men you have loved. There's no heavier woe, Peter."
Again his gaze went from the boy, from the room, from the present. "I
did not see Abraham Lincoln again until he was dead," he said. "They
brought him back and set his bier in the old court-house. The night he
lay there I went in past the guards and looked long upon the face of him
who had been my friend. I saw the sadness and the sorrow, the greatness
and the glory, that life and death had sculptured there. He had dreamed
and he had done. When the time had come he had been ready. I knelt
beside his coffin; and I promised God and Abraham Lincoln that I would,
before I died, make atonement for the faith I had broken."

Peter's sobbing had died down to husky flutterings of breath, but he
kept his face averted from the man at the other side of the table.
"I meant to make some sort of reparation," James Thorold explained,
listlessness falling like twilight on his mood as if the sun had gone
down on his power, "but I was always so busy, so busy. And there seemed
no real occasion for sacrifice. I never sought public office or public
honors till I thought you wanted me to have them, Peter." He turned
directly to the boy, but the boy did not move. "I was so glad of
Forsland--yesterday. Through all these years I have told myself that,
after all, I had done no great wrong. But sometimes, when the bands were
playing and the flags were flying, I knew that I had turned away from
the Grail after I had looked upon it. I knew it to-day when I stood
beside that boy's coffin. I had said that times change. I know now that
only the time changes. The spirit does not die, but it's a stream that
goes underground to come up, a clear spring, in unexpected places. My
father died in Mexico. I failed my country. And Isador Framberg dies
at Vera Cruz."

"For our country," the boy said bitterly.

"And his own," his father added. "For him, for his people, for all these
who walk in darkness Abraham Lincoln died. The gleam of his torch shone
far down their lands. His message brought them here. They have known him
even as I, w