I could not call this speech joyous.

“There are said to be risks in any union, sir,” I ventured to say.  “I admit I do not follow you in contemplating any risk whatever.  If either you or your daughter doubts my loyalty or affection, then I should say certainly it were wise to end all this; but—­” and I fancied I straightened perceptibly—­“I think that might perhaps be left to Miss Elisabeth herself.”

After all, Mr. Dan Churchill was obliged to yield, as fathers have been obliged from the beginning of the world.  At last he told me I might take my fate in my own hands and go my way.

Trust the instinct of lovers to bring them together!  I was quite confident that at that hour I should find Elisabeth and her aunt in the big East Room at the president’s reception, the former looking on with her uncompromising eyes at the little pageant which on reception days regularly went forward there.

My conclusion was correct.  I found a boy to hold my horse in front of Gautier’s cafe.  Then I hastened off across the intervening blocks and through the grounds of the White House, in which presently, having edged through the throng in the ante-chambers, I found myself in that inane procession of individuals who passed by in order, each to receive the limp handshake, the mechanical bow and the perfunctory smite of President Tyler—­rather a tall, slender-limbed, active man, and of very decent presence, although his thin, shrunken cheeks and his cold blue-gray eye left little quality of magnetism in his personality.

It was not new to me, of course, this pageant, although it never lacked of interest.  There were in the throng representatives of all America as it was then, a strange, crude blending of refinement and vulgarity, of ease and poverty, of luxury and thrift.  We had there merchants from Philadelphia and New York, politicians from canny New England and not less canny Pennsylvania.  At times there came from the Old World men representative of an easier and more opulent life, who did not always trouble to suppress their smiles at us.  Moving among these were ladies from every state of our Union, picturesque enough in their wide flowered skirts and their flaring bonnets and their silken mitts, each rivalling the other in the elegance of her mien, and all unconsciously outdone in charm, perhaps, by some demure Quakeress in white and dove color, herself looking askance on all this form and ceremony, yet unwilling to leave the nation’s capital without shaking the hand of the nation’s chief.  Add to these, gaunt, black-haired frontiersmen from across the Alleghanies; politicians from the South, clean-shaven, pompous, immaculately clad; uneasy tradesmen from this or the other corner of their commonwealth.  A motley throng, indeed!