Although it was some moments before North recognized his visitor, his resentment at this unseasonable intrusion passed quickly; the personality in the chair was so charming, so magnetic, so genial. He was a young man, between thirty and forty, with a long nose, a mobile mouth, dark gray-blue eyes full of fire and humour, and a massive head. It was a face of extraordinary power and intellect, but lit up by a spirit so audacious and impulsive and triumphant that it was like a leaping flame of dazzling brilliancy in some forbidding fortress. He was smiling with a delighted expression of good fellowship; but North experienced a profound conviction that the man was weighing and analyzing him, that he would weigh and analyze everybody with whom he came in contact, and make few mistakes. "Who the deuce can he be?" he thought, "and why doesn't he speak?" And then it occurred to him that he had not spoken, himself. He was about to inquire with somewhat perfunctory courtesy in what manner he could serve his visitor, when his glance fell on the man's hands. He sat erect with a slight exclamation and experienced a stiffening at the roots of his hair. The hands under the lace ruffles were the most beautiful that ever had been given to a man, even to as small a man as this. They were white and strong and delicate, with pointed fingers wide apart, and filbert nails. North knew them well, for they were the hands of the man whom he admired above all men in the history of his country. But until to-night he had seen them on canvas only, in the Treasury Department of the United States. His feeling of terror passed, and he sat forward eagerly. "The little lion," he said caressingly, for the man before him might have been his son, although he had been in his tomb with a bullet in his heart for nearly a century. But he looked so young, so restless, so indomitable, that the years slipped out of the century, and Hamilton once more was the most brilliant ornament of a country which had never ceased to need him. "Yes," he said brightly, "here I am, sir, and you see me at last. This is that one moment in the lifetime of the few when the spirit burns through the flesh and recognizes another spirit who has lost that dear and necessary medium. I have been with you a great deal in your life, but you never have been able to see me until to-night." He gave his head an impatient toss. "How I have wished I were alive during the last three or four months!" he exclaimed. "Not that I could have accomplished what you could not, sir, but it would have been such a satisfaction to have been able to make the effort, and then, when I failed, to tell democracy what I thought of it."