“And uncle Philip.  I couldn’t be happy without his approval.  I have been longing to tell him.  I would have told him at once if I hadn’t felt bound to speak to William first.  Dear uncle Philip!  He is always happy over anything that makes me happy.  Next to you, dear heart, there is no one in all the world that I love so much—­not half so much.  And there is no one whom he loves as he does me; he thinks only of my happiness.”

Her eyes sought his with a wistful look.  She felt that he did not like Philip Alston, and there was distress in the thought that these two, whom she loved most out of all on earth, should not be the warmest of friends.

“You mustn’t think him indifferent because he hasn’t been to see you,” she pleaded.  “Please don’t think that, for it isn’t true.  He hasn’t come because he never can bear the sight of suffering.  He says it’s purely a physical peculiarity which he cannot control.  Anything that makes him think of violence or cruelty shocks and repulses him.  He shrinks from it as he would from a harsh sound or an evil odor.  He says it’s because his refinement is greater than his humanity.  But it is really his tender heart.  Some day when you know him better you will find his heart as tender as I have always found it.”

He, knowing what was in her loving heart, could not meet her gaze, and hastily looked away gazing across the river.  His thoughts swiftly followed his eyes, for he would not have been the man that he was, could even this great new love which was now filling his heart, and was to fill all his future life, have made him forget his old love for this great new state, and the awful crises through which it was passing.

For that was a time of great stress, of deep anxiety, and of almost intolerable suspense.  Those early days and nights of November in the year eighteen hundred and eleven, were indeed among the most stressful in the whole stormy history of Kentucky.  And through her—­since her fate was to be the fate of the Empire of the West—­they were as portentous as any that the nation has ever known.  On that very day in truth, and not very far off, there had already been enacted one of the mightiest events that went to the shaping of the national destiny.  Over the river on the banks of its tributary, the Wabash, the battle of Tippecanoe had been fought and won between the darkness and daylight of that gloomy seventh of November.  The young doctor, like all the people of the country, knew that the long-dreaded hour had struck, that this last decisive struggle between the white race and the red must be close at hand; but neither he nor any one in that region knew that it was already ended.  There had not been a single sign or sound to tell when the conflict was actually going on.  It was said that the roar of the cannon was heard much farther away, as far even as Monk’s Mound, where the Trappists—­those most ill-fated of Kentucky pioneers—­had found temporary refuge.  But if this be true, it must have been by reason of the fact that sound carries very far over vast level prairies, when it cannot cross a much shorter distance which rises in hills covered with forests, such as shut out every echo of the battle from Cedar House.