Hayward was on good terms with the world. For the first time he accepted the overbearing manner of superiority of white men with complacency and even with amusement. His time was coming—he could wait. He went so far as almost to invite affronts from several negroes of more or less prominence, who had aforetime rebuffed his advances, in order, as it were, to keep their offences in pickle so that their chagrin might be more keen when the day of his elevation should come. He was at particular pains to keep Henry Porter’s opposition going, and smiled when he thought how thoroughly he would pay him off in his own coin. For a few weeks he put himself with buoyant determination to the regular study of his text-books, which he had theretofore read with more or less intermittent interest, and began to lay out plans for the political campaign which would be necessary to bring about the issuing and confirmation of his commission. He arranged with a personal friend, a lawyer in New Hampshire, for the transmission of all correspondence and papers relating to the matter in the name of John H. Graham through this lawyer’s hands,—thus to conceal from the President even after the request for the appointment had been made the fact that his footman was the applicant. The thinking out and arranging of these details and the first rush of his attack upon his military studies engrossed him for a month or more in every moment he was off duty. So closely did he hold himself that Lily Porter reproved him gently for his remissness several times before he made his first call upon her. He was really working very hard—in his leisure hours. He had completely reversed the order of work and diversion. To the one-time monotony of his daily tasks he was now held by the fascination of chance moments of speech—most often conventional, occasionally personal, always delightful—with the radiant young woman his wife, upon whom even to look in silence was enough to send his blood a-leap. Every day from the very first he took time from his work of preparation to write to her.... The habit grew. At first briefly, though always with fervent protestations, and, as the days and weeks ran on, more and more at length and with livening heat did he put his heart-beats in his letters.... The habit grew too fast. By the time that Congress met and the currents of the great capital were in full swing, the forces of Hayward’s love had eaten into his ambition’s boundaries and the time that he gave to thoughts of Helen, and in seeking variant and worthy phrases in which to indite his passion, more than equalled that in which he worked to earn those things which by her decree should precede possession of her.... It was hard not to stop and think of her. He wrote: