, threw a spell no woman could resist.

Each day's working hours were given to his father's case and to the study
of law. If there was work to do, he did it, and then struck the word care
from his life, giving himself body and soul to his love. Great events were
moving. The shock of the battle between Congress and the President began
to shake the Republic to its foundations. He heard nothing, felt nothing,
save the music of Elsie's voice.

And she knew it. She had only played with lovers before. She had never
seen one of Ben's kind, and he took her by storm. His creed was simple.
The chief end of life is to glorify the girl you love. Other things could
wait. And he let them wait. He ignored their existence.

But one cloud cast its shadow over the girl's heart during these
red-letter days of life--the fear of what her father would do to her
lover's people. Ben had asked her whether he must speak to him. When she
said "No, not yet," he forgot that such a man lived. As for his politics,
he knew nothing and cared less.

But the girl knew and thought with sickening dread, until she forgot her
fears in the joy of his laughter. Ben laughed so heartily, so
insinuatingly, the contagion of his fun could not be resisted.

He would sit for hours and confess to her the secrets of his boyish dreams
of glory in war, recount his thrilling adventures and daring deeds with
such enthusiasm that his cause seemed her own, and the pity and the
anguish of the ruin of his people hurt her with the keen sense of personal
pain. His love for his native State was so genuine, his pride in the
bravery and goodness of its people so chivalrous, she began to see for the
first time how the cords which bound the Southerner to his soil were of
the heart's red blood.

She began to understand why the war, which had seemed to her a wicked,
cruel, and causeless rebellion, was the one inevitable thing in our growth
from a loose group of sovereign States to a United Nation. Love had given
her his point of view.

Secret grief over her father's course began to grow into conscious fear.
With unerring instinct she felt the fatal day drawing nearer when these
two men, now of her inmost life, must clash in mortal enmity.

She saw little of her father. He was absorbed with fevered activity and
deadly hate in his struggle with the President.

Brooding over her fears one night, she had tried to interest Ben in
politics. To her surprise she found that he knew not