nd motioned me to bring another chair for myself.

"Are you going to let me in?" cried Ruyven.

"Oh, go to the--" began Dorothy, then flushed and glanced at me, asking
pardon in a low voice.

A nice parent, Sir Lupus, with every child in his family ready to swear
like Flanders troopers at the first breath!

Half reclining in her chair, limbs comfortably extended, Dorothy crossed
her ankles and clasped her hands behind her head, a picture of indolence
in every line and curve, from satin shoon to the dull gold of her hair,
which, as I have said, the powder scarcely frosted.

"To comprehend properly this war," she mused, more to herself than to
me, "I suppose it is necessary to understand matters which I do not
understand; how it chanced that our King lost his city of Boston, and
why he has not long since sent his soldiers here into our county
of Tryon."

"Too many rebels, cousin," I suggested, flippantly. She disregarded me,
continuing quietly;

"But this much, however, I do understand, that our province of New York
is the centre of all this trouble; that the men of Tryon hold the last
pennyweight, and that the balanced scales will tip only when we patroons
cast in our fortunes, ... either with our King or with the rebel
Congress which defies him. I think our hearts, not our interests, must
guide us in this affair, which touches our honor."

Such pretty eloquence, thoughtful withal, was not what I had looked for
in this new cousin of mine--this free-tongued maid, who, like a painted
peach-fruit all unripe, wears the gay livery of maturity, tricking the
eye with a false ripeness.

"I have thought," she said, "that if the issues of this war depend on
us, we patroons should not draw sword too hastily--yet not to sit like
house-cats blinking at this world-wide blaze, but, in the full flood of
the crisis, draw!--knowing of our own minds on which side lies
the right."

"Who taught you this?" I asked, surprised to over-bluntness.

"Who taught me? What? To think?" She laughed. "Solitude is a rare spur
to thought. I listen to the gentlemen who talk with father; and I would
gladly join and have my say, too, but that they treat me like a fool,
and I have my questions for my pains. Yet I swear I am dowered with more
sense than Sir John Johnson, with his pale eyes and thick, white flesh,
and his tarnished honor to dog him like the shadow of a damned man sold
to Satan--"

"Is he dishonored?"

"Is a parole broken a dish