"Oh, isn't that interesting! Tell me all about it!"
"Really I cannot. I have never told that, even to my mother. There is only one other person who knows of it. It is my one secret, and my life—that is, my future—depends largely upon it. There's too much at stake."
"Would you fear to trust your life—your future—in my hands?" asked the woman softly. "I could be a very good and a very faithful friend."
The lure in her voice was irresistible.
"I would trust my soul with you," he answered, and with the spoken faith the trust was perfected in his heart. "Listen."
He told her all about himself, of his name and his history, of his life and his hopes. He was modest in his recital of the creditable things he had done; but when he had told her of his claim upon the President's gratitude and the purpose toward which he would use it, and began to talk of his ambition and his dreams, his heart was fired by its own fervour, and before the very warmth of his own eloquence all obstacles and difficulties faded as mists before the sun, and he felt that he needed only to put forth his hands to grasp his heart's desires.
The girl was touched with his fire. She listened with ready sympathy to the beginning of his story, heard with quickening pulses of his rescue of Colonel Phillips, and in the telling of his hopes was caught in the current of his transporting fervency and carried along with him to realize the vision of his martial career.
"And that is the picture of your life! It is—it will be—glorious!" She rose in her enthusiasm. "Oh, that a woman might—"
"Glorious—yes," the man said; "and till to-night it had seemed perfect to me. But I have been blind to its greatest lack. You have made me conscious of it." Hayward stood up and moved toward the girl, who wavered uncertainly between reserve and complaisance.
"I would paint another figure into that picture, Lily—the figure of a woman." He put his hands out toward her, and her coldness was melting when—"Lily," said her father from the hall, "what did you do with the evenin' paper? I want to read Mr. Shaw's speech before the convention this mornin'. Mr. Brown told me that it is the greates' speech that's been made yet."