“I know. But he refused to be governor of Florida too, and first thing I knew here I was packing to go to Pensacola. Emily, all I ask is so little—just to be allowed to stay in my home with my husband and my family. I don’t suit proud places. Sometimes I feel that Mr. Jackson must be ashamed of me.” “Nonsense, aunt Rachel!” Emily gave the quivering figure a quick hug. “Uncle Jackson thinks you are perfect.” “I wish I wasn’t getting so fat! It shortens my breath so.” In her own room Emily quickly made her bed and hung her clothes away in the big wardrobe. Then she sat at the window again to read her letter. Words she had passed over lightly before in her happy daze now leaped out to trouble her. “Circumstances that have arisen,” Jack had written. A cold kind of prescience oppressed the girl, shot through with a breathless excitement, as though she had heard a trumpet blow. It had come to her that there was always about Andrew Jackson that atmosphere of great events impending. Always when he seemed most intimate, familiar and dear, there was a cloak of aloofness shutting him in, a remote and dedicated sort of mystery. As though even when he was thinking homely thoughts—a lame mare, a fire that needed replenishing—he was listening to some far, calling drum. As though never could he belong entirely to this Hermitage, this woman that he loved, the young people he scolded and indulged impartially. Emily was very young and a trifle naïve, but there was a wisdom deep in her that recognized the destiny that cloaked this man she loved like a garment of silver, and her young mind dreaded it even while it thrilled her. She remembered John Eaton’s words, that people were saying that Andrew Jackson should be President of the United States. She remembered, too, aunt Rachel’s positive declaration that this he could not be! No palaces for her, she had announced—but had there been a tinge of desperation in that declaration? Did aunt Rachel feel the pressure of destiny too, that remote glory that invested her man on horseback? It would be exciting, Emily was thinking, to live in that new president’s palace in Washington. The British had burned it in retaliation for the sack of Toronto by the American forces, but it had been rebuilt, finer than ever, she had heard, and now it was as important as Buckingham Palace. Aunt Rachel had no wish to be a queen in a palace. Only too well Emily knew that aunt Rachel would be an unhappy queen. “But I would love it!” she said suddenly aloud. Silks and satins, servants bowing, diplomats with medals and ribbons on their gleaming shirt bosoms, sentries and bands playing, her thoughts raced and thrilled. If only she and Jack could be guests in that palace! It was wonderful even to think about. She sat in a roseate dream for a chilly half hour, while her own fate hovered near, unfathomed. The fate that would make her, Emily Donelson, a young queen in a palace—and an unhappy queen! 3