I was not without my alarms for Peg's coming; but when she tripped in upon the General and myself, it was as balm to my bruised nature to feel on her part some quick leniency towards me, and a certain tacit sweetness--somewhat sorrowful, but none the less good--to which I had been alien since the day I laid those witless strictures upon Eaton for that he was conceived without a soul. This gentle attitude of Peg's came upon me like summer weather, touching everything with sunshine, and the hour took on a sudden pleasant value. Peg could not fail to see the change; and even the General would be aware of that improvement. “Now you must have brought June in your apron,” said the General, playing with Peg. “In any event, you have thawed our frigid friend here. He has been frozen for days, and now you see his face glows like harvest-home.” “If that be true,” laughed Peg--quite her old beautiful laugh, too, and not a laugh contrived solely for the General, but with a share for me--“if that be true, I must show more pains to come often, and not make my stay so short as has been my wont. I did not know that I was such a blessing.” The General would make Peg have her old chair by my desk, which showed me--and I wondered over it not a little--how he was observant beyond what I had supposed, to be thus sharp on that small point of where Peg would sit when in confab with me. When Peg was throned in her old place--and, to my eyes, she filled the room with a kind of glory--the General drew up his own chair so as to put us three to be the corners of a triangle. “We have brought you here,” quoth the General, giving his face a droll expression by which one might tell him to be in a frame of amiable lightness, “we have brought you here, the good, thawed Major and I, to make a despot of you. We draw towards New Year's Day, when our society Redsticks will start upon the warpath. We desire to put ourselves and our White House, and all we have besides, in your hands. You have but to publish your orders, and lo! we carry them out. Being now set to rule over us, the Major--and I perceive with joy he is quite warmed through--would crave your commands for him. As for myself, you have had only to lift your finger to dispose of half my kingdom since ever that day when I lay dying and you revived me with the name of Calhoun.” When he said this, the General beamed on Peg in his tolerant, paternal fashion, while for my side I sat silent, yet the happiest one of all, since I was growing sure and more sure with every moment how my Peg of the old days had of a truth come back. I would not stop to query how or why; it was enough to have it so, and the music that went singing in my heart with this white surprise of joy was near to betraying me into humming a tune--a burst of harmony, had I been weakly guilty of it, which the General would have made the material of his mirth for so long a term it would weary him who sought to measure it.