The Captain walked over to the window, and said nothing.  He did not see the searching gray eyes of his old friend upon him.

“Lige!” said the Colonel.

The Captain turned.

“Lige, why don’t you give up steamboating and come along to Europe?  You’re not forty yet, and you have a heap of money laid by.”

The Captain shook his head with the vigor that characterized him.

“This ain’t no time for me to leave,” he said.  “Colonel; I tell you there’s a storm comin’.”

The Colonel pulled his goatee uneasily.  Here, at last, was a man in whom there was no guile.

“Lige,” he said, “isn’t it about time you got married?”

Upon which the Captain shook his head again, even with more vigor.  He could not trust himself to speak.  After the Christmas holidays he had driven Virginia across the frozen river, all the way to Monticello, in a sleigh.  It was night when they had reached the school, the light of its many windows casting long streaks on the snow under the trees.  He had helped her out, and had taken her hand as she stood on the step.

“Be good, Jinny,” he had said.  “Remember what a short time it will be until June.  And your Pa will come over to see you.”

She had seized him by the buttons of his great coat, and said tearfully:  “O Captain Lige!  I shall be so lonely when you are away.  Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

He had put his lips to her forehead, driven madly back to Alton, and spent the night.  The first thing he did the next day when he reached St. Louis was to go straight to the Colonel and tell him bluntly of the circumstance.

“Lige, I’d hate to give her up,” Mr. Carvel said; “but I’d rather you’d marry her than any man I can think of.”

CHAPTER IX

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

In that spring of 1860 the time was come for the South to make her final stand.  And as the noise of gathering conventions shook the ground, Stephen Brice was not the only one who thought of the Question at Freeport.  The hour was now at hand for it to bear fruit.

Meanwhile, his hero, the hewer of rails and forger of homely speech, Abraham Lincoln, had made a little tour eastward the year before, and had startled Cooper Union with a new logic and a new eloquence.  They were the same logic and the same eloquence which had startled Stephen.

Even as he predicted who had given it birth, the Question destroyed the great Democratic Party.  Colonel Carvel travelled to the convention in historic Charleston soberly and fearing God, as many another Southern gentleman.  In old Saint Michael’s they knelt to pray for harmony, for peace; for a front bold and undismayed toward those who wronged them.  All through the week chosen orators wrestled in vain.  Judge Douglas, you flattered yourself that you had evaded the Question.  Do you see the Southern delegates rising in their seats?  Alabama leaves the hall, followed by her sister stakes.  The South has not forgotten your Freeport Heresy.  Once she loved you now she will have none of you.