love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger—they have set this thing to rule over the Southern people"
The doctor sprang to his feet, his face livid, his eyes blazing with emotion. "Merciful God—it surpasses human belief!"
He sank exhausted in his chair, and, extending his hand in an eloquent gesture, continued:
"Surely, surely, sir, the people of the North are not mad? We can yet appeal to the conscience and the brain of our brethren of a common race?"
Stoneman was silent as if stunned. Deep down in his strange soul he was drunk with the joy of a triumphant vengeance he had carried locked in the depths of his being, yet the intensity of this man's suffering for a people's cause surprised and distressed him as all individual pain hurt him.
Dr. Cameron rose, stung by his silence, and the consciousness of the hostility with which Stoneman had wrapped himself.
"Pardon my apparent rudeness, Doctor," he said, at length, extending his hand. "The violence of your feeling stunned me for the moment. I'm obliged to you for speaking. I like a plain-spoken man. I am sorry to learn of the stupidity of the former military commandant in this town"
"My personal wrongs, sir," the doctor broke in, "are nothing!"
"I am sorry, too, about these individual cases of suffering. They are the necessary incidents of a great upheaval.
