Left alone, Thorold paced the platform a little apart from the group of men who had evidently been delegated to represent the city. Some of them he knew. Others of them, men of Isador Framberg's people and of the ten tribes of Israel, he did not care to know. He turned away from them to watch the people beyond the gates. Thousands of faces, typical of every nation of Europe and some of the lands of Asia, fair Norsemen and Teutons, olive-skinned Italians and men and women of the swarthier peoples of Palestine, Poles, Finns, Lithuanians, Russians, Bulgars, Bohemians, units of that mass which had welded in the city of the Great Lakes of America, looked out from behind the iron fence. The tensity written on their faces, eager yet awed, brought back to James Thorold another time when men and women had stood within a Chicago railway terminal waiting for a funeral cortège, the time when Illinois waited in sorrow to take Abraham Lincoln, dead, to her heart. The memory of that other day of dirges linked itself suddenly in the mind of James Thorold with the picture of the lilacs blooming in the yard of the Adams homestead on the parkway, that old house where Abraham Lincoln had been wont to come; and the fusing recollections spun the ambassador to Forsland upon his heel and sent him far down the platform, where he stood, gloomily apart, until the limited, rolling in from the end of the yards, brought him hastening to its side. Peter Thorold was the first to alight. A boy of sixteen, fair-haired, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, springing from the platform of the Pullman into his father's arms, he brought with him the atmosphere of high adventure. In height, in poise of shoulders, in bearing, in a certain trick of lifting his chin, he was a replica of the dignified man who welcomed him with deep emotion; but a difference--of dream rather than of dogma--in the quality of their temperaments accoladed the boy. It was not only that his voice thrilled with the higher enthusiasms of youth. It held besides an inflexibility of tone that James Thorold's lacked. Its timbre told that Peter Thorold's spirit had been tempered in a furnace fierier than the one which had given forth the older man's. The voice rang out now in excited pleasure as the boy gripped his father's shoulders. "Oh, but it's good to see you again, dad," he cried. "You're a great old boy, and I'm proud of you, sir. Think of it!" he almost shouted. "Ambassador to Forsland! Say, but that's bully!" He slipped his arm around his father's shoulder, while James Thorold watched him with eyes that shone with joy. "What do you call an ambassador?" he demanded laughingly. "Fortunately," the older man said, "there is no title accompanying the office." "Well, I should think not," the boy exclaimed. "Oh, dad, isn't it the greatest thing in the world that you're to represent the United States of America?"