He paused and bowed his head, overcome with emotion.

Betty gently pressed his trembling fingers. Her voice was low.

"I'm proud of your love, Ned. It's very beautiful

"But you don't love me?" he groaned.

"Not as you love me."

He looked searchingly and hungrily into her brown eyes:

"Is it John?"

She shook her head slowly and thoughtfully: "No."

"And it's no one else?"

"No."

"Then I won't take that answer!" he cried with

desperate earnestness. "I'm going to win you. I'll love you with a love so big and true I'll make you love me. Everything's against me now. Your father's against me. I'm going to fight your country and your people. You admire the new President. I despise him. The passions of war have separated us, that's all. But I won't give up. The war can't last long. You'll see things in a different way when it ends."

Betty smiled into his pleading eyes: "How little you know me, Boy! Nothing on this earth could separate me from the man I love"she paused and breathed quickly -I'd follow him blindfold to the bottomless pit once I'd given him my heart!"

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Ned rose suddenly to his feet and drew Betty with him. His hand now was hot with the passion that fired his soul.

"Then you're worth fighting for. And I'm going to fight-fight for what I believe to be right and fight you"

for you

He stopped suddenly and his slender figure straightened:

"I'm coming back to you, Betty!" he said with clear ringing emphasis. "I'm coming back to Washington. I'll be with an army conquering, triumphant, because they are right. There'll be a new President in the White House and I'll win!"

He bowed and reverently kissed the tips of her fingers.

"You glorious boy!" she sighed. "It's beautiful to be loved like that! I'm proud of it—I'll hold my head a little higher with every thought of you”

"And you'll think of me sometimes when war has separated us?"

"I'll never forget!"

"And remember that I'm fighting my way back to your side?"

A tender smile played about the corners of her eyes and mouth:

"I'll remember."

With a quick, firm movement he turned, passed through the house, and strode toward the iron gate. He suddenly confronted John entering.

The two brothers faced each other for a moment angrily and awkwardly, and then the anger slowly melted from the younger man's eyes.

"You are taking dinner with Miss Betty to-night?" Ned asked in friendly tones.

"Yes, I'm going with her to the White House," was the cold reply.

"I'm leaving in an hour. Don't you think it's foolish for two brothers who have been what you and I have been to each other to part like this? We may not see one another again."

John hesitated and then slowly slipped his arm around the younger man, holding him in silence. When his voice was steady he said:

"Forgive me, Boy. meant so much to me.

I was blind with anger. It

But we'll face it. We'll have

to fight it out-as God gives us wisdom to see the right

Ned's hand found his, and clasped it firmly:

"As God gives us to see the right, John-Goodbye."

"Good-bye, Boy, it's hard to say it!"

They clung to each other for a moment and slowly drew apart as the shadows of the soft spring night deepened.

CHAPTER VIII

THE TRIAL BY FIRE

The troops transformed Washington from a lazy - Southern town of sixty thousand inhabitants into an armed fortress of the frontier, swarming with a quarter of a million excited men and women. Soldiers thronged the streets and sidewalks and sprawled over every inch of greensward, their uniforms of every cut and color on which the sun of heaven had shone during the past two hundred years of history.

When the tumult and the shouts of departing regiments had died away from the home towns in the North and the flags that were flying from every house had begun to fade under the hot rays of the advancing summer, the patriotic orators and editors began to demand of their President why his grand army of seventy-five thousand lingered at the Capital. When he mildly suggested the necessity of drilling, equipping and properly arming them he was laughed at by the wise, and scoffed at as a coward by the brave.

Mutterings of discontent grew deeper and more threatening. They demanded a short, sharp, decisive campaign. Let the army wheel into line, march straight into Richmond, take Jefferson Davis a prisoner, hang him and a few leaders of the "rebellion," and the trouble would be over. This demand became at length the maddened cry of a mob:

"On to Richmond!"

Every demagogue howled it. Every newspaper repeated it. As city after city, and State after State

took up the cry, the pressure on the man at the helm

of Government became resistless. It was a political necessity to fight a battle and fight at once or lose control of the people he had been called to lead.

The Abolitionists only sneered at this cry. They demanded an answer to a single insistent question: "What are you going to fight about?"

A battle which does not settle the question of Slavery they declared to be a waste of blood and treasure. If the slave was not the issue, why fight? The South would return to the Union which they had always ruled if let alone. Why fight them for nothing?

Gilbert Winter, their spokesman at Washington, again confronted the President with his uncompromising demand:

"An immediate proclamation of emancipation!"

And the President with quiet dignity refused to consider it.

"Why?" again thundered the Senator.

His answer was always the same:

"I am not questioning the right or wrong of Slavery. If Slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. But the Constitution, which I have sworn to uphold in the Border States of Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky, guarantees to their people the right to hold slaves if they choose. We have already eleven Southern States solidly arrayed against us. Add the Border States by such a proclamation, and the contest is settled before a blow is struck. I know the power of State loyalty in the South. I was born there. Many