Page:The Clansman (1905).djvu/171

 he must speak to him. When she said "No, not yet," he forgot that such a man lived. As for his politics, he knew nothing and cared less.

But the girl knew and thought with sickening dread, until she forgot her fears in the joy of his laughter. Ben laughed so heartily, so insinuatingly, the contagion of his fun could not be resisted.

He would sit for hours and confess to her the secrets of his boyish dreams of glory in war, recount his thrilling adventures and daring deeds with such enthusiasm that his cause seemed her own, and the pity and the anguish of the ruin of his people hurt her with the keen sense of personal pain. His love for his native state was so genuine, his pride in the bravery and goodness of its people so chivalrous, she began to see for the first time how the cords which bound the Southerner to his soil were of the heart's red blood.

She began to understand why the war, which had seemed to her a wicked, cruel, and causeless rebellion, was the one inevitable thing in our growth from a loose group of sovereign states to a United Nation. Love had given her his point of view.

Secret grief over her father's course began to grow into conscious fear. With unerring instinct she felt the fatal day drawing nearer when these two men, now of her inmost life, must clash in mortal enmity.

She saw little of her father. He was absorbed with fevered activity and deadly hate in his struggle with the President.

Brooding over her fears one night, she had tried to