t of its
soil, every hill and valley, mountain, lake, and sea, and every man,
woman, and child that breathes beneath its skies. I am an American."

As the burning words leaped from the heart of the President the broad
shoulders of his tall form lifted, and his massive head rose in
unconscious heroic pose.

"I marvel that you ever made war upon your loved ones!" cried the cynic.

"We fought the South because we loved her and would not let her go. Now
that she is crushed and lies bleeding at our feet--you shall not make war
on the wounded, dying, and the dead!"

Again the lion gleamed in the calm gray eyes.

CHAPTER IV

THE BATTLE OF LOVE

Elsie carried Ben Cameron's pardon to the anxious mother and sister with
her mind in a tumult. The name on these fateful papers fascinated her. She
read it again and again with a curious personal joy that she had saved a
life!

She had entered on her work among the hospitals a bitter partisan of her
father's school, with the simple idea that all Southerners were savage
brutes. Yet as she had seen the wounded boys from the South among the men
in blue, more and more she had forgotten the difference between them. They
were so young, these slender, dark-haired ones from Dixie--so pitifully
young! Some of them were only fifteen, and hundreds not over sixteen. A
lad of fourteen she had kissed one day in sheer agony of pity for his
loneliness.

The part her father was playing in the drama on which Ben Cameron's life
had hung puzzled her. Was his the mysterious arm back of Stanton? Echoes
of the fierce struggle with the President had floated through the
half-open door.

She had implicit faith in her father's patriotism and pride in his giant
intellect. She knew that he was a king among men by divine right of
inherent power. His sensitive spirit, brooding over a pitiful lameness,
had hidden from the world behind a frowning brow like a wounded animal.
Yet her hand in hours of love, when no eye save God's could see, had led
his great soul out of its dark lair. She loved him with brooding
tenderness, knowing that she had gotten closer to his inner life than any
other human being--closer than her own mother, who had died while she was
a babe. Her aunt, with whom she and Phil now lived, had told her the
mother's life was not a happy one. Their natures had not proved congenial,
and her gentle Quaker spirit had died of grief in the quiet home in
southern Pennsylvania.

Yet there