Theo sank into the opposite chair, her heart pounding. She would see him there—Meme. The unthinking spurt of joy died down. But how should they meet as strangers? How comport herself through a state dinner without showing her feelings? How conceal those feelings from the all-seeing eyes of Aaron?

'It's—isn't it late in the season for official dinners?' she stammered. 'There cannot be many people left in town.'

'The Gallatins and the Madisons are still here, at any rate, and the foreign ministers. We are all in a rare pother over Jefferson's remarkable negotiation with Bonaparte. You haven't heard, I suppose?'

He went on before she need answer. 'He has swapped some fifteen million of our hard-won dollars for a tract of country so far away and so vast that no one has ever seen it. I have no doubt Bonaparte was delighted to get rid of the burden, and is now sniggering up his sleeve at us, poor gullible fools. The Spaniards, moreover, are enraged. It is the beginning of a mort of trouble. How like Jefferson, who never can make up his mind, to choose for an exception a piece of unbridled bad judgment. And he did it, too, against all advice.'

'But does it not add to the prestige of our nation? We shall be larger than the whole of Europe.'

'Pish,' said Aaron impatiently. 'We had too much land already. Far more than can be governed from this ramshackle village here. Even a thousand miles away, on the shores of the Ohio, I hear that they are resentful of our pretensions. Think you that the bears and the wolves and the savages in the territory beyond will be an asset to us? If indeed that unexplored country supports any life at all. For no white man has ever penetrated most of it. No—the purchase was a piece of egregious folly.'

Yet one white man was preparing to explore this new territory, thought Theo. For the first time she felt a thrill of pride in Merne's ambition, followed quickly by sick dread. Her father, too, thought the purchase was folly, and this confirmed her own instinctive judgment. The expedition was foredoomed to failure. Merne's lot would be not only foolhardy danger but ridicule. How can I stop him? she thought desperately. Somehow I must make him listen to me. I'll plead and reason, use all the influence of our love. Yet, even as she made incoherent plans, she knew how helpless she was.

Aaron, staring abstractedly at the floor, went on, half to himself. 'Before long this unwieldy mass of land will divide into its logical parts. There is no government now or in the future which can cope with such geographical differences. The lands beyond the Alleghenies will break away. Those mountains form a barrier far more formidable than the arbitrary divisions in Europe.'