“We have brought you here,” quoth the General, giving his face a droll expression by which one might tell him to be in a frame of amiable lightness, “we have brought you here, the good, thawed Major and I, to make a despot of you. We draw towards New Year's Day, when our society Redsticks will start upon the warpath. We desire to put ourselves and our White House, and all we have besides, in your hands. You have but to publish your orders, and lo! we carry them out. Being now set to rule over us, the Major—and I perceive with joy he is quite warmed through—would crave your commands for him. As for myself, you have had only to lift your finger to dispose of half my kingdom since ever that day when I lay dying and you revived me with the name of Calhoun.”
When he said this, the General beamed on Peg in his tolerant, paternal fashion, while for my side I sat silent, yet the happiest one of all, since I was growing sure and more sure with every moment how my Peg of the old days had of a truth come back. I would not stop to query how or why; it was enough to have it so, and the music that went singing in my heart with this white surprise of joy was near to betraying me into humming a tune—a burst of harmony, had I been weakly guilty of it, which the General would have made the material of his mirth for so long a term it would weary him who sought to measure it.
“And I am to order you and your White House up and down in my campaign?” cried Peg, sparkling forth.
“Have I not told you how you are to be a despot?”
“And I may have a dinner, a reception, or a dance, or what I will—the carpets up in the East Room, if I choose?”
“Your word shall be as Aladdin magic among us, your very hint a law.”
“Well, then,” cried Peg, whose smile was a bright comrade for the General's, “well, then, now that I am clothed of this high estate, I must not begin by being rash. Let me consider!” And with that Peg put her little hand to her brow with such another air of jaunty profundity I would have clinked down a fortune to have had her on canvas just as she sat—Peg, in the great chair that but an hour gone was mocking me as my most hateful enemy, and which now would be the friendliest thing in life.