With quick salute he passed out and Betty stood irresolute as she listened to the echo of his horse's hoof-beat growing fainter. It was only six o'clock, but the days were getting shorter and it was already dark. She could walk quickly down Pennsylvania Avenue and reach the White House before dinner. He would see her at any hour. In five minutes she was on the way her mind in a whirl of speculation on the intrigue which might lie behind that sensational announcement. She was beginning to suspect her lover's patriotism. A man could love the South, fight and die for it and be a patriot--he was dying for what he believed to be right--God and his country. But no man could serve two masters. Her blood boiled at the thought of a conspiracy within the lines of the Union whose purpose was to betray its Chief. If John Vaughan were in it, she loved him with every beat of her heart, but she would cut her heart out sooner than sink to his level! She became conscious at last of the brazen stares of scores of brutal-looking men who thronged the sidewalks of the Avenue. Gambling dens had grown here like mushrooms during the past year of war's fevered life. The vice and crime of the whole North and West had poured into Washington, now swarming with a quarter of a million strange people. The Capital was no longer a city of sixty thousand inhabitants, but a vast frontier post and pay station of the army. And such a pay station! Each day the expenditures of the Government were more than two millions. The air was electric with the mad lust for gain which the scent of millions excites in the nostrils of the wolves who prey on their fellow men. The streets swarmed with these hungry beasts, male and female. They pushed and crowded and jostled each other from the sidewalks. The roar of their whiskey-laden voices poured forth from every bar-room and gambling den on the Avenue. A fat contractor who had made his pile in pasteboard soles for army shoes and sent more boys to the grave from disease than had been killed in battle, touched elbows with the hook-nosed vulture who was sporting a diamond pin bought with the profits of shoddy clothes that had proven a shroud for many a brave soldier sleeping in a premature grave. They were laughing, drinking, smoking, swearing, gambling and all shouting for the flag--the flag that was waving over millions they hoped yet to share.