Only a fool would have hoped after this—­and at least I never gave her ground to call me that.  Not even did I commit the folly of revealing my need.  She alone ever knew it, and she only in the way that the child had known the schoolboy to gloom and rage afar in his passion for her.  She had no word of mine for it then, nor had she now, and I believe she felt rather certain there never would be any.  She seemed to be grateful for this and doubly kind, with only now and then the flash of a knowing look, or the trifle of a deep, swiftly questioning glance, born, I dare say, of that curiosity which the devil contrives to kindle in God’s most angelic women.

Doubtless she had a little speech of refusal patted into kindliness for me.  Perhaps she would not have been wholly anguished to have me hear this—­to be able to assure me tenderly, graciously, of the depth and pureness of her friendship for me.  Who knows?  I am older now, and things once hidden are revealed.  Sometimes I think that a certain new respect for me grew within her as the days tried the metal of my silence—­a respect, but nothing more.  Her appreciation of my face was too palpably without those reservations that so often cry louder than words.

So we sealed our secret, she and I, in an unspoken pledge, and not even Solon Denney, so keen of scent for rivals, ever divined it.

He called me out with the old boyish whistle the day he confided to me the tremendous news of his engagement.  He laughed, foolish with joy as he told it, and I felt tingling in my arms that old boyish, brute impulse to slay him for the wretched ease of his victory.  But we were men, so I thrust one of those rebellious arms in among the strands of the creeper, where her own arm had once been, and laid the other on his shoulder in all friendliness.  This, while he rambled on of the bigness of life, the great future before Arcady of the Little Country, the importance of the Argus, which he had just founded, and the supreme excellence of that splendid mechanism, the new Washington hand-press, installed the week before.

His life was builded of these many interests, of her and himself and his country and his town.  In the fulness of his heart he even brought out the latest Argus and read parts from his obituary of Douglas, while I stood stupidly striving to realize what I had long known must be true.

“A great man has fallen,” he read, declaiming a little, as in our school days.  “Stephen A. Douglas is dead.  The voice that so lately and eloquently appealed to his countrymen is hushed in—­”

How long he read is uncertain.  But from moment to moment his tones would call me back from visions, and I would vaguely hear that one was gone who had warned his fellows against the pitfalls of political jealousy, and bade all who loved their country band against those who would seek to pluck a laurel from the wreath of our glorious confederacy.