Peg, then, was the truth itself for height and mould, and her pretty hands and feet told of no tavern in their genesis, even though the lip of envy did. I give you my first impression of her, earned eye to eye and ear to voice. I say the latter because her voice was as honey and wove conviction like a spell. She had your pansy face; a face regular and ineffably good. And how any, even a woman and a rival, might look her deep eyes through and doubt her, masters conjecture! Peg's hair--hanging in long curls about her neck and shoulders--was black; fine as silk or cobwebs; black, yet with the gold-black of the black Saxon. And her skin was snow and peach-blow. There was meditation, too, in her wide brow; and her mouth, with teeth like milk, was both firm and loving. Also, there was that in her atmosphere to bring brave men to her. It was upon one in a moment that Peg, while tender to be hurt, was hard to conquer; sensitive, she would feel her fate; yet she would face it--face it with the faithful courage of an angel. But I'll have done; why furnish the fragments and queer splinters of a portrait I'm too inaptly dull to offer as a whole! Peg O'Neal came this day, and making herself known, gave me my first sight of her in the drawing room of the Indian Queen. There was a look about her, lonely, bitter and pathetic; a look that should belong with one hunted, and who waits to be made sure of her friends. She gave me her hand; white and soft and small and yielding--it was as though I took hold on a lily. My heart went out to her before she spoke; as I've confessed, I was warm for her cause on the instant. Peg had read the cabinet list in the paper; I think, too, she foresaw the woe and worry to become the tail of it more clearly than did either the General or myself, or even the port-wine Duff Green. It was of that she desired to talk; she would see the General; but first she would see me. This preference for myself before the General was a common custom into which Peg readily stepped. All who knew the General, knew me for his other self; and I will say, despite the inference of a boast, knew me for his calmer and more prudent self. Peg did not come to me until the afternoon, and before I go to the story of our converse it would be as well to sketch a handful of incidents which preceded her advent and which should be understood to teach one the whole truth of this tale. This Washington day I have on my mind's edge, being the one next before the day Peg came to me, was the fourteenth of February, St. Valentine's Day, albeit the latter has nothing of part herein. We had arrived, the General and myself, on the tenth, and housed at the Indian Queen. This tavern was not the tavern of old, when that O'Neal who was Peg's father prevailed as master, yet even under new control--and with a born conservative like myself, the new is ever the defective--it was a first hostel of the capital.