While Aaron sits with the fatal letter in his fingers, his friend Van Ness comes in. He turns his black eyes on the visitor--eyes misty, dim, the brightness lost from them. “What dreams were mine,” he sighs--“what dreams for my brave little boy! He is dead, and half my world has died.” Toward the end of summer, Alston sends word that the lustrous Theo is in danger. The loss of her boy has struck at the roots of her life. Aaron, in new alarm, writes urging that she come North. He sends a physician from New York to bring her to him. Alston consents; he himself cannot come. His duties as governor tie him. The lustrous Theo, eager to meet her father with whom she parted on that tearful evening in Stone Street so many years ago, will start at once. He, Alston, shall later follow her. Alston sees the lustrous Theo aboard the schooner _Patriot_, then lying in Charleston harbor. It is rough December weather when the _Patriot_ clears for New York. The message of her sailing reaches Aaron overland, and he is on strain for the schooner’s arrival. Days come, days go; the schooner is due--overdue. Still no sign of those watched-for topsails down _the_ lower bay! And so time passes. The days become weeks, the weeks months. Hope sickens, then dies. Aaron, face white and drawn, a ghost’s face, reads the awful truth in that long waiting. The lustrous Theo is dead--like the baby! It is then the iron of a measureless adversity enters his soul! Aaron goes about the daily concerns of life, making no moan. He does not speak of his loss, but saves his grief for solitude. One day a friend relates a rumor that the schooner was captured by buccaneers, and the lustrous Theo lives. The broken Aaron shakes his head. “She is dead!” says he. “Thus is severed the last tie that binds me to my kind.” Aaron hides his heart from friend and foe alike. As though flying from his own thoughts, he plunges more furiously than ever into the law. While Aaron’s first concern is work, and to earn money for those whom he calls his creditors, he finds time for politics. “Not that I want office,” he observes; “for he who was Vice-President and tied Jefferson for a presidency, cannot think on place. But I owe debts--debts of gratitude, debts of vengeance. These must be paid.” Aaron’s foes are in the ascendant. De Witt Clinton is mayor--the aristocrats with the Livingstons, the Schuylers and the Clintons, are everywhere dominant. They control the town; they control the State. At Washington, Madison a marionette President, is in apparent command, while Jefferson pulls the White House wires from Monticello. All these Aaron sees at a glance; he can, however, take up but one at a time. “We will begin with the town,” says he, to the stubborn, loyal Swartwout. “We must go at the town like a good wife at her house-cleaning. Once that is politically spick and span, we shall clean up the State and the nation.” Aaron calls about him his old circle of indomitables.