She started.

“Why, Stephen,” she cried, “I felt the same way!”

“And then,” he continued quickly, “it was strange that I should have gone to Judge Whipple, who was an intimate of your father’s—­such a singular intimate.  And then came your party, and Glencoe, and that curious incident at the Fair.”

“When I was talking to the Prince, and looked up and saw you among all those people.”

He laughed.

“That was the most uncomfortable of all, for me.”

“Stephen,” she said, stirring the leaves at her feet, “you might have taken me in your arms the night Judge Whipple died—­if you had wanted to.  But you were strong enough to resist.  I love you all the more for that.”

Again she said:—­ “It was through your mother, dearest, that we were most strongly drawn together.  I worshipped her from the day I saw her in the hospital.  I believe that was the beginning of my charity toward the North.”

“My mother would have chosen you above all women, Virginia,” he answered.

In the morning came to them the news of Abraham Lincoln’s death.  And the same thought was in both their hearts, who had known him as it was given to few to know him.  How he had lived in sorrow; how he had died a martyr on the very day of Christ’s death upon the cross.  And they believed that Abraham Lincoln gave his life for his country even as Christ gave his for the world.

And so must we believe that God has reserved for this Nation a destiny high upon the earth.

Many years afterward Stephen Brice read again to his wife those sublime closing words of the second inaugural:—­

   “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
   right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
   the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him
   who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his children
  —­to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace
   among ourselves and with all nations.”

AFTERWORD

The author has chosen St. Louis for the principal scene of this story for many reasons.  Grant and Sherman were living there before the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln was an unknown lawyer in the neighboring state of Illinois.  It has been one of the aims of this book to show the remarkable contrasts in the lives of these great men who came out of the West.  This old city of St. Louis, which was founded by Laclede in 1765, likewise became the principal meeting-place of two great streams of emigration which had been separated, more or less, since Cromwell’s day.  To be sure, they were not all Cavaliers who settled in the tidewater Colonies.  There were Puritan settlements in both Maryland and Virginia.  But the life in the Southern states took on the more liberal tinge which had characterized that of the Royalists,