_Gutzon Borglum’s conception of Abraham Lincoln._ _Considered the most inspired head of Lincoln ever modelled._ From the memorial head in the Capitol, Washington, D. C. At last, worn out with mental and moral wrestlings, she turned to her father for help. Lincoln was working at high pressure and he had some perplexities of debts. She shrank from troubling him. Her heart must have beat in slow, suffocating throbs when she crept to her father’s arms and confessed her fears: What if McNamar should come back! She need not trouble her golden head about that! The country would be too hot to hold him. Lincoln had thrashed the breath out of a man for swearing before women in his store. But what if he still loved her, trusted her, was on his way back, confident and happy, to claim her? What if he could lift this veil of mystery and stand forth clear and manly? McNamar would never appear in such guise, bless her innocent heart. He was a black-hearted scoundrel. In the old days, in South Carolina, men of the Rutledge breed would have killed such a hound. But he was alarmed now, surely, at this strange obsession, and questioned her. And then the whole piteous truth was out. She was _afraid_ he would come back--shuddering at the thought--come back to reproach her with pale face and stricken eyes. And she loved him no longer. She had been so happy this summer, and then it began to seem all wrong. Love forsaken was such pain and bewilderment. Could she endure happiness purchased at the price of another’s misery? McNamar had come back, indeed, and love was impotent to defend this hapless innocence! She had never understood his behaviour. Incapable of such baseness herself, she had never comprehended his. Like a flower she had been blighted by the frost of his desertion, and had revived to brief, pale life in a new sun; but the blight had struck to the root. But what beauty of soul was here revealed, adding poignancy to grief! No one had quite known her. Physically so perfect, no one had divined those exquisite subtleties of the heart that made her hold on life tenuous. Lincoln was sent for but he was not found at once, for his employments kept him roving far afield. Round and round, in constantly contracting circles, her inverted reason, goaded by an accusing conscience ran until, at last, her sick fancy pictured herself as the faithless one. The event was forgotten--she remembered only the agony of love forsaken. And so she slipped away into the delirium of brain fever.