She glanced at the New Englander, against whom she had been in strange rebellion since she had first seen him.  His face, thinned by the summer in town, was of the sternness of the Puritan.  Stephen’s features were sharply marked for his age.  The will to conquer was there.  Yet justice was in the mouth, and greatness of heart.  Conscience was graven on the broad forehead.  The eyes were the blue gray of the flint, kindly yet imperishable.  The face was not handsome.

Struggling, then yielding to the impulse, Virginia let herself be led on into the years.  Sanity was the word that best described him.  She saw him trusted of men, honored of women, feared by the false.  She saw him in high places, simple, reserved, poised evenly as he was now.

“Why do you go in this afternoon?” she asked abruptly.

He started at the change in her tone.

“I wish that I might stay,” he said regretfully.  “But I cannot, Miss Carvel.”

He gave no reason.  And she was too proud to ask it.  Never before had she stooped to urge young men to stay.  The difficulty had always been to get them to go.  It was natural, perhaps, that her vanity was wounded.  But it hurt her to think that she had made the overture, had tried to conquer whatever it was that set her against him, and had failed through him.

“You must find the city attractive.  Perhaps,” she added, with a little laugh, “perhaps it is Bellefontaine Road.”

“No,” he answered, smiling.

“Then” (with a touch of derision), “then it is because you cannot miss an afternoon’s work.  You are that kind.”

“I was not always that kind,” he answered.  “I did not work at Harvard.  But now I have to or—­or starve,” he said.

For the second time his complete simplicity had disarmed her.  He had not appealed to her sympathy, nor had he hinted at the luxury in which he was brought up.  She would have liked to question Stephen on this former life.  But she changed the subject suddenly.

“What did you really think of Mr. Lincoln?” she asked.

“I thought him the ugliest man I ever saw, and the handsomest as well.”

“But you admired him?”

“Yes,” said Stephen, gravely.

“You believe with him that this government cannot exist half slave and half free.  Then a day will come, Mr. Brice, when you and I shall be foreigners one to the other.”

“You have forgotten,” he said eagerly, “you have forgotten the rest of the quotation.  ’I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—­I do not expect the house to fall—­but cease to be divided.’  It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Virginia laughed.  “That seemed to me very equivocal,” said she.  “Your rail-sputter is well named.”

“Will you read the rest of that speech?” he asked

“Judge Whipple is very clever.  He has made a convert of you,” she answered.

“The Judge has had nothing to do with it,” cried Stephen.  “He is not given to discussion with me, and until I went to Springfield had never mentioned Lincoln’s name to me.”