t he was
looking at Philip Alston and spoke to him.

"You have, I suppose, sir, mentioned to my uncle what you so kindly
suggested to me, in the event that the attorney-general should resign on
going to Tippecanoe."

The deepest feeling that Ruth had ever heard in his voice thrilled it
now. She involuntarily bent forward. Her eager lips were apart, her
radiant eyes were upon him. Was he going with the attorney-general to
Tippecanoe? She was afraid, glad, frightened, proud, all in a breath.
She had forgotten the beautiful gifts that lay before her. The mere
mention, the merest thought of the noble and the great, stirred her
heart like the throb of mighty drums.

"No, but I will speak to him about it now," replied Philip Alston.
"Judge, Judge Knox!" raising his voice.

The judge, aroused, sat up, looking round. But William Pressley spoke
again before Philip Alston could explain.

"If the attorney-general really intends to go, he must resign. There
will, of course, be many applicants for the place, and we can hardly be
too prompt in applying for it, if I am to succeed him."

Ruth sank back in her chair. The fabric which she had held unconsciously
now dropped unheeded from her hand. She could not have told why she felt
such a shock of revulsion and disappointment. She had known something
like it before, when this man who was to be her husband had shown some
strange insensibility to great things which had moved her own heart to
its depths. But the feeling had never been so strong as it was now; had
never come so near revealing to her the real character of him with whom
her whole life was to be spent; and she was still more bewildered and
perplexed than shocked or distressed. She thought that she must have
misunderstood; that he could not have meant thus to pass over this great
national crisis,--this noble offering of a great man's life to the
service of his country,--in unfeeling haste to grasp some selfish profit
from it. She looked at him wonderingly, with all the light gone out of
her face. Being what she was, she could not see that he was just as true
to his nature as she was to hers; that he was following it with entire
sincerity in looking at the noblest things in life and the greatest
things in the world, solely as they affected himself and his own
interests. It was not for a nature like hers ever to understand that a
nature like his would, if it could, bend the whole universe to his own
ends without a doubt th