She set her own little feet in that path, determined that he should not outdistance her if she could keep up with his strides. They could not be married until he was admitted to the bar, so she took up her old plan of going to Jacksonville Academy. Her brother David was going to college there, and then was to study law with Lincoln. What endearing ties were beginning to bind him to her family! They spent long afternoons studying, and Lincoln made rapid progress, for his mind was clear and keen, freed from its old miasma of melancholy. But they seemed curiously to have changed characters. Ann had been the one of placid temperament, dwelling on a happy level of faith in a kind world. Lincoln had, by turns, been hilarious and sunk in gloom. Privations and loss had darkened his youth; promise lured his young manhood only to mock; powers were given him only to be baffled. But now life was fair, the course open, the goal in sight, happiness secure! For Ann had the quiet ways, the steadfast love, and the sweet, sweet look, in which a man, jaded and goaded by the world of struggle, could find rest. Surely fate had played all her malicious tricks! It was enough for him, that summer, to lie at his lady’s feet, his elbows in the grass, his shock head in his hands, absorbed in Chitty’s “Pleadings.” Ann studied fitfully, often looking off absently across field and river, starting from deep reverie when he spoke to her. Her mother noticed her long, grave silences, but thought of them as the pensive musings of a young girl in love. This impression was increased by her absorption in her lover. When with him, talking with him, a subtle excitement burned in her eye and pulsed in her cheek; but when he was gone the inner fire of her spirit seemed to turn to ashes. She clung desperately, visibly, to this new love--so infinitely more precious and satisfying than the old. She did not doubt its reality, but happiness, in the nature of things, was to her, now, evanescent and escaping. People remembered afterward, as the days lengthened, how fragile Ann looked, as if withered by hot, sleepless nights--how vivid and tremulous. She had spells of wild gaiety, her laughter bubbling up like water from a spring, and she grew lovelier, day by day. And there were times, when Lincoln was away in the harvest-field or on surveying trips, that she sat pale and listless and brooding for hours, with hands that had always been so busy and helpful, clasped idly in her lap. Like Juliet, she must often have cried in her secret heart, “Oh, love, remain!” Left alone, she became the prey of torturing thoughts. Life had dealt Ann Rutledge but one blow, but that had struck to the roots of her physical and spiritual life. Her world still tottered from the shock. If she had confessed all her first vague, foolish fears, her mind might have been freed of their poison. But she came of brave blood and tried to fight her battle alone. Illustration: Copyright, 1907, by Gutzon Borglum.