Again he smothered her words and held her in mad close embrace.
"Let me go--let me go!" she cried with sudden fury, thrusting him from her, breathless, her eyes blinded with tears.
"Tell me that you love me!" he cried with desperate pleading.
The splendid young figure faced him tense, quivering with rage.
"How dare you take me in your arms like that without a word?" Her eyes were flashing, her breast rising and falling with quick furious breathing.
He seized her hand and held it with cruel force. Her eyes blazed and he dropped it. She was thinking of the scene with his slender chivalrous brother. She could feel the soft kiss on the tips of her fingers and the blood surged to her face at the thought of this man's lips pressed on hers in mad, strangling passion without so much as by your leave! She could tear his eyes out.
He looked at her now in a hopeless stupor of regret.
"Forgive me, Betty," he faltered. "I--I couldn't help it."
"I suppose that's all any woman has ever meant to you, and you took me for granted----"
"Please, please, Miss Betty," he groaned.
"You may go now," she said with slow emphasis.
He looked at her a moment dazed, and a wave of sullen anger slowly mounted his face to the roots of his black tangled hair, which he suddenly brushed from his forehead.
Without a word he walked out into the storm, his jaws set. The door had scarcely closed, when the trembling figure crumpled on the lounge in a flood of bitter tears.
Before the sun had set on the day of storm which followed the panic at Bull Run, the President had selected and summoned to Washington the man who was to create the first Grand Army of the Republic--a man destined to measure the full power of his personality against the Chief Magistrate in a desperate struggle for the supremacy of the life of the Nation itself.
General George Brinton McClellan, in answer to the summons, reached Washington on July the 20th, and immediately took command of the Army of the Potomac--or of what was left of it.
The President did not make this selection without bitter opposition and grave warning. He was told that McClellan was an aggressive pro-slavery Democrat, a political meddler and unalterably opposed to him and his party on every essential issue before the people. These arguments found no weight with the man in the White House. He would ask but one question, discuss but one issue: