ELSIE carried Ben Cameron's pardon to the anxious mother and sister with her mind in a tumult. The name on these fateful papers fascinated her. She read it again and again with a curious personal joy that she had saved a life!
She had entered on her work among the hospitals a bitter partisan of her father's school, with the simple idea that all Southerners were savage brutes. Yet as she had seen the wounded boys from the South among the men in blue, more and more she had forgotten the difference between them. They were so young, these slender, dark-haired ones from Dixie—so pitifully young! Some of them were only fifteen, and hundreds not over sixteen. A lad of fourteen she had kissed one day in sheer agony of pity for his loneliness.
The part her father was playing in the drama on which Ben Cameron's life had hung puzzled her. Was his the mysterious arm back of Stanton? Echoes of the fierce struggle with the President had floated through the half-open door.
She had implicit faith in her father's patriotism and pride in his giant intellect. She knew that he was a king among men by divine right of inherent power. His sensitive
