The deepest feeling that Ruth had ever heard in his voice thrilled it now.  She involuntarily bent forward.  Her eager lips were apart, her radiant eyes were upon him.  Was he going with the attorney-general to Tippecanoe?  She was afraid, glad, frightened, proud, all in a breath.  She had forgotten the beautiful gifts that lay before her.  The mere mention, the merest thought of the noble and the great, stirred her heart like the throb of mighty drums.

“No, but I will speak to him about it now,” replied Philip Alston.  “Judge, Judge Knox!” raising his voice.

The judge, aroused, sat up, looking round.  But William Pressley spoke again before Philip Alston could explain.

“If the attorney-general really intends to go, he must resign.  There will, of course, be many applicants for the place, and we can hardly be too prompt in applying for it, if I am to succeed him.”

Ruth sank back in her chair.  The fabric which she had held unconsciously now dropped unheeded from her hand.  She could not have told why she felt such a shock of revulsion and disappointment.  She had known something like it before, when this man who was to be her husband had shown some strange insensibility to great things which had moved her own heart to its depths.  But the feeling had never been so strong as it was now; had never come so near revealing to her the real character of him with whom her whole life was to be spent; and she was still more bewildered and perplexed than shocked or distressed.  She thought that she must have misunderstood; that he could not have meant thus to pass over this great national crisis,—­this noble offering of a great man’s life to the service of his country,—­in unfeeling haste to grasp some selfish profit from it.  She looked at him wonderingly, with all the light gone out of her face.  Being what she was, she could not see that he was just as true to his nature as she was to hers; that he was following it with entire sincerity in looking at the noblest things in life and the greatest things in the world, solely as they affected himself and his own interests.  It was not for a nature like hers ever to understand that a nature like his would, if it could, bend the whole universe to his own ends without a doubt that such was its best possible use.

Philip Alston, also, was regarding William Pressley with rather an inscrutable look.  But his estimate and understanding were fairer than Ruth’s, for the reason that he could come nearer to giving the young man his due.  He knew that William Pressley was honest and sincere in his vanity and conceit, and was assured that these traits were the worst he possessed.  Philip Alston knew men, and he had found that those who honestly thought highly of themselves usually had something, more or less, to found the opinion upon.  He had never known a bad man who sincerely thought himself a good one.  He knew that many dull men really believed themselves to be