d,
good-natured, sensible, masterful and clear in intellect, strong, yet
modest, kind and gentle--yes, he was more interesting than all the drama
and romance of the stage!

He held her imagination in a spell. Elsie, divining her abstraction,
looked toward the President's box and saw approaching it along the balcony
aisle the figure of John Wilkes Booth.

"Look," she cried, touching Margaret's arm. "There's John Wilkes Booth,
the actor! Isn't he handsome? They say he's in love with my chum, a
senator's daughter whose father hates Mr. Lincoln with perfect fury."

"He is handsome," Margaret answered. "But I'd be afraid of him, with that
raven hair and eyes shining like something wild."

"They say he is wild and dissipated, yet half the silly girls in town are
in love with him. He's as vain as a peacock."

Booth, accustomed to free access to the theatre, paused near the entrance
to the box and looked deliberately over the great crowd, his magnetic face
flushed with deep emotion, while his fiery inspiring eyes glittered with
excitement.

Dressed in a suit of black broadcloth of faultless fit, from the crown of
his head to the soles of his feet he was physically without blemish. A
figure of perfect symmetry and proportion, his dark eyes flashing, his
marble forehead crowned with curling black hair, agility and grace stamped
on every line of his being--beyond a doubt he was the handsomest man in
America. A flutter of feminine excitement rippled the surface of the crowd
in the balcony as his well-known figure caught the wandering eyes of the
women.

He turned and entered the door leading to the President's box, and
Margaret once more gave her attention to the stage.

Hawk, as Dundreary, was speaking his lines and looking directly at the
President instead of at the audience:

"Society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old
woman, you darned old sockdologing man trap!"

Margaret winced at the coarse words, but the galleries burst into shouts
of laughter that lingered in ripples and murmurs and the shuffling of
feet.

The muffled crack of a pistol in the President's box hushed the laughter
for an instant.

No one realized what had happened, and when the assassin suddenly leaped
from the box, with a blood-marked knife flashing in his right hand, caught
his foot in the flags and fell to his knees on the stage, many thought it
a part of the programme, and a boy, leaning over the gallery rail,
gig