“But Peg,” cried I, at last; “what will you do with Peg?” The General would try to smile at this, but the effort was as futile as had been my own. But he did not fence at me with any jesting reminder of how Peg was no part of his cabinet; he met my thought squarely and would make allowance for my feeling. “It is most natural,” he returned, “that you should ask of Peg. We have guarded our little girl too long--you and I--not to own her first in our concern. Peg, then, shall go to Florida and be a queen. I shall give Eaton that Governorship; we may yet need a firm hand in St. Augustine. Is it not a good thought? Our Peg shall rule among those Spaniards; it will almost be to have a throne and wear a crown. Does not that please you, when now her station under kinder skies is to be so splendid and so notably enhanced?” From him I turned and paced the room; then from sadness my anger began to swell, for I am one whose grief runs with the end of it into wrath. “Tell me one thing,” cried I at last, pausing before the General. “Why do you dissolve your cabinet?” “Will it not lop off three arms of Calhoun's power?” he asked. “Does it not palsy Branch and Ingham and Berrien?” “But is that the true reason?” I demanded. “It is the one I shall let the world believe, it any rate.” “That should be no answer,” I retorted, my heart like a furnace with the rage that was coming over me. “Why do you palter? I have the right to know. You have made your dozen poor jests upon me, and said I was in love with Peg. Perhaps you would mean those jests. I tell you I do not believe your word when you say it is a move against Calhoun. That is mere glamour and fallacy and meant for blindness. It is no tale to tell me as though I were some common gull. Give me your reason, then--the true one. Does Eaton know he is to go?” All this I reeled off, and gave the General no opening for an answer, asking a dozen questions at once. But he sat quiet and with a friendly patience, and his face spoke to me only of nearness and sympathy, and never a shade of hurt for the rudeness I visited upon him. What a heart of gold was his! He, who bore nothing from an enemy, would bear all at the hands of a friend. When I was run out of queries he began to take me up, beginning at the end. “Eaton knows,” said he; “he knew before he left for Baltimore. For him the change will be a relief; his has been no bed of flowers, and in St. Augustine his place and power, and last, not least, his peace, will gain promotion.” “Doubtless,” said I, in a high pitch of scorn, “he can there flaunt his riches in the faces of the Dons, and show Peg's beauty, and make a vast display.” “You interrupt me,” remarked the General. “However let me ask a question: Why do you remind me how I've jested and mayhap made some idle laugh between us, and as innocent as idle, over your feeling for the little girl? Why do you put that to me?”