“I feel old and wise,” she said, “and at the same time much younger, because I no longer shrink from a load on my mind I cannot understand.  And you—­it has all gone.”  She darted at the candle and held it to his face.  “You look twenty years younger than when you sat there and thought.  I believed you were dying of old age.”

“I feel better,” he admitted, “But nothing can obliterate the scars.  And although I shall always be young at intervals, remember that I have crowded three lifetimes into one, and that I must pay the penalty spiritually and physically, although mentally I believe I shall hold my own until the end.”  He leaned forward on a sudden impulse and took both her hands.  “I make you a vow,” he said, “and I have never broken even a promise—­or only one,” he added, remembering Troup’s accusation.  “I will drive the bitterness out of myself and I will hate no more.  My public acts shall be unaccompanied by personal bitterness henceforth.  Not a vengeance that I have accomplished has been worth the hideous experience of to-night, and so long as I live I shall have no cause to repeat it.”

“If you ever broke that vow,” said Angelica, “I should either die or go crazy, for you would sink and never rise again.”

VI

As Hamilton had anticipated, the Jacobin press shouted and laughed itself hoarse, vowed that it never could have concocted so effective a bit of campaign literature, and that the ursine roars of Adams could be heard from Dan to Beersheba.  Burr, as yet undetected, almost danced as he walked.  The windows were filled with parodies of the pamphlet, entitled, “The Last Speech and Dying Words of Alexander Hamilton,” “Hamilton’s Last Letter and His Amorous Vindication,” “A Free Examination of the Morals, Political and Literary Characters of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton.”  One cartoon displayed the sinking ship Administration, with the Federal rats scuttling out of her, and Hamilton standing alone on the deck; another, “The Little Lion” sitting, dejected and forlorn, outside the barred gates of “Hamiltonopolis.”  The deep, silent laughter of Jefferson shook the continent.

The Federalist leaders were furious and aghast.  But they recovered, and when the time came, every Federalist delegate to the Electoral College, with one exception, voted precisely as Hamilton had counselled.  South Carolina deserted Pinckney because he would not desert Adams, but she would have pursued that policy had the pamphlet never been written; and whether it affected the defeat of the Federalists in Pennsylvania and other States is doubtful.  The publication in August of Adams’s letter to Tench Coxe, written in 1792, when he was bitterly disappointed at Washington’s refusal to send him as minister to England, and asserting that the appointment of Pinckney was due to British influence, thus casting opprobrium upon the integrity of Washington, had done as much as Hamilton’s