ossible that he should; but I knew them both. I knew their
secret. Were it in his power to do so, I am sure that he carried his
secret with him, so that it might never be shared by any. That secret
he has guarded in death as in life."

"But shall I let that stain rest on his name?" The dark eye of the old
woman gleamed upon her son's friend.

"Do not I love him also? I am speaking now only of his own wish--not
ours. I know that he would shield her at any cost--nay, I know he did
shield her at any cost. May not we shield him--and her--no matter what
the cost to us? If he laid that wish on us, ought we not to respect
it? Madam, I shall frame a letter which will serve to appease the
criticism of the public in regard to your son. If it be not the exact
truth--and who shall tell the exact truth?--it will at least be
accepted as truth, and it will forever silence any talk. What should
the public know of a life such as his? There are some lives which are
tragically large, and such was his. He lived with honor, and he could
not die without it. What was in his heart we shall not ask to know.
If ever he sinned, he is purged of any sin."

Jefferson was silent for a moment, holding the bereaved mother's hand
in his own.

"He shall have a monument, madam," he went on. "It shall mark his
grave in yonder wilderness. They shall name at least a county for him,
and hold it his sacred grave-place--there in Tennessee, by the old
Indian road. Let him lie there under the trees--that is as he would
wish. He shall have some monument--yes, but how futile is all that!
His greatest monument will be in the vast new country which he has
brought to us. He was a man of a natural greatness not surpassed by
any of his time."

* * * * *

What of Theodosia Alston, loyal and lofty soul, blameless wife,
devoted and pathetic adherent to the fallen fortunes of her
ill-starred father?

Three years after Meriwether Lewis laid him down to sleep in the
forest, a ship put out from Charleston wharf. It was bound for the
city of New York, where at that time there was living a broken,
homeless, forsaken man named Aaron Burr--a man execrated at home,
discredited abroad, but who now, after years of exile, had crept home
to the country which had cast him out.

A passenger on that ship was Theodosia Alston, the daughter of Aaron
Burr. That much is known. The ship sailed. It never came to port. No
more is known.

To this day no