eclaring John McNamar false, Ann Rutledge
could hardly be blamed for imagining that he was either dead or had
transferred his affections.

It was not until McNeill, or McNamar, had been gone many months, and
gossip had become offensive, that Lincoln ventured to show his love
for Ann, and then it was a long time before the girl would listen
to his suit. Convinced at last, however, that her former lover had
deserted her, she yielded to Lincoln's wishes and promised, in the
spring of 1835, soon after Lincoln's return from Vandalia, to
become his wife. But Lincoln had nothing on which to support a
family--indeed, he found it no trifling task to support himself. As
for Ann, she was anxious to go to school another year. It was decided
that in the autumn she should go with her brother to Jacksonville and
spend the winter there in an academy. Lincoln was to devote himself
to his law studies; and the next spring, when she returned from school
and he was a member of the bar, they were to be married.

A happy spring and summer followed. New Salem took a cordial interest
in the two lovers and presaged a happy life for them, and all would
undoubtedly have gone well if the young girl could have dismissed the
haunting memory of her old lover. The possibility that she had wronged
him, that he might reappear, that he loved her still, though she now
loved another, that perhaps she had done wrong--a torturing conflict
of memory, love, conscience, doubt, and morbidness lay like a shadow
across her happiness, and wore upon her until she fell ill. Gradually
her condition became hopeless; and Lincoln, who had been shut from
her, was sent for. The lovers passed an hour alone in an anguished
parting, and soon after, on August 25, 1835, Ann died.

The death of Ann Rutledge plunged Lincoln into the deepest gloom. That
abiding melancholy, that painful sense of the incompleteness of life
which had been his mother's dowry to him, asserted itself. It filled
and darkened his mind and his imagination, tortured him with its black
pictures. One stormy night Lincoln was sitting beside William Greene,
his head bowed on his hand, while tears trickled through his fingers;
his friend begged him to control his sorrow, to try to forget. "I
cannot," moaned Lincoln; "the thought of the snow and rain on her
grave fills me with indescribable grief."

He was seen walking alone by the river and through the woods,
muttering strange things to himself. He seemed to