"Why, father!" Incredulity heightened the boyishness in Peter's tone. James Thorold wheeled around until he faced him. "Peter," he said huskily, "there's something you'll have to know before I go to Forsland--if ever I go to Forsland. You'll have to decide." The boy shrank from the ominous cadence of the words. "Why, I can't judge for you, dad," he said awkwardly. "Our children are always our ultimate judges," James Thorold said. "I have sometimes wondered," he went on, speaking to himself rather than to the puzzled boy, "how the disciples who met Christ but who did not go his way with him to the end felt when they heard he had died. I knew a great man once, Peter. I went his way for a little while, then I took my own. I saw them bring him, dead, over the way they have brought that boy to-day. I came down to the court-house that night, and there, just where that boy lies, Peter, I made a promise that I have not kept." Again he resumed his pacing, speaking as he went, sometimes in low tones, sometimes with tensity of voice, always as if urged by some force that was driving him from silence. The boy, leaning forward at the edge of the chair, watched his father through the first part of the story. Before the end came he turned away. "You remember," James Thorold began, his voice pleading patience, "that I've told you I came to Chicago from Ohio before the war? I was older than you then, Peter, but I was something of a hero-worshipper, too. Judge Adams was my hero in those troublous times of the fifties. I knew him only by sight for a long time, watching him go in and out of the big white house where he lived. After a time I came to know him. I was clerking in a coffee-importing house during the day and studying law at night. Judge Adams took me into his office. He took me among his friends. Abraham Lincoln was one of them. "I remember the night I met Lincoln. Judge Adams had talked of him often. He had been talking of him that day. 'Greatness,' he had said, 'is the holding of a great dream, not for yourself, but for others. Abraham Lincoln has the dream. He has heard the voice, and seen the vision, and he is climbing up to Sinai. You must meet him, James.' That night I met him in the old white house. "We were in the front parlor of the old house," James Thorold continued, resetting the scene until his only listener knew that it was more real to him than the room through which he paced, "when some one said, 'Mr. Lincoln.' I looked up to see a tall, awkward man standing in the arched doorway. Other men have said that they had to know Lincoln a long time to feel his greatness. My shame is the greater that I felt his greatness on the instant when I met his eyes.