“Lige,” he said, “isn't it about time you got married?”
Upon which the Captain shook his head again, even with more vigor. He could not trust himself to speak. After the Christmas holidays he had driven Virginia across the frozen river, all the way to Monticello, in a sleigh. It was night when they had reached the school, the light of its many windows casting long streaks on the snow under the trees. He had helped her out, and had taken her hand as she stood on the step.
“Be good, Jinny,” he had said. “Remember what a short time it will be until June. And your Pa will come over to see you.”
She had seized him by the buttons of his great coat, and said tearfully: “O Captain Lige! I shall be so lonely when you are away. Aren't you going to kiss me?”
He had put his lips to her forehead, driven madly back to Alton, and spent the night. The first thing he did the next day when he reached St. Louis was to go straight to the Colonel and tell him bluntly of the circumstance.
“Lige, I'd hate to give her up,” Mr. Carvel said; “but I'd rather you'd marry her than any man I can think of.”
CHAPTER IX. SIGNS OF THE TIMES
In that spring of 1860 the time was come for the South to make her final stand. And as the noise of gathering conventions shook the ground, Stephen Brice was not the only one who thought of the Question at Freeport. The hour was now at hand for it to bear fruit.
Meanwhile, his hero, the hewer of rails and forger of homely speech, Abraham Lincoln, had made a little tour eastward the year before, and had startled Cooper Union with a new logic and a new eloquence. They were the same logic and the same eloquence which had startled Stephen.