, "For that very reason, if
for none other, you must be our guest to-night, Mistress Thankful
Blossom. We still retain our Virginian ideas of hospitality, and are
tyrannous enough to make strangers conform to them, even though we have
but perchance the poorest of entertainment to offer them. Lady
Washington will not permit Mistress Thankful Blossom to leave her roof
to-night until she has partaken of her courtesy as well as her counsel."

"Mistress Thankful Blossom will make us believe that she has at least
in so far trusted our desire to serve her justly, by accepting our poor
hospitality for a single night," said Lady Washington, with a stately
courtesy.

Thankful Blossom still stood irresolutely at the door. But the next
moment a pair of youthful arms encircled her; and the younger
gentlewoman, looking into her brown eyes with an honest frankness equal
to her own, said caressingly, "Dear Mistress Thankful, though I am but
a guest in her ladyship's house, let me, I pray you, add my voice to
hers. I am Mistress Schuyler of Albany, at your service, Mistress
Thankful, as Col. Hamilton here will bear me witness, did I need any
interpreter to your honest heart. Believe me, dear Mistress Thankful,
I sympathize with you, and only beg you to give me an opportunity
to-night to serve you. You will stay, I know, and you will stay with
me; and we shall talk over the faithlessness of that over-jealous
Yankee captain who has proved himself, I doubt not, as unworthy of YOU
as he is of his country."

Hateful to Thankful as was the idea of being commiserated, she
nevertheless could not resist the gentle courtesy and gracious sympathy
of Miss Schuyler. Besides, it must be confessed that for the first
time in her life she felt a doubt of the power of her own independence,
and a strange fascination for this young gentlewoman whose arms were
around her, who could so thoroughly sympathize with her, and yet allow
herself to be snubbed by Lady Washington.

"You have a mother, I doubt not?" said Thankful, raising her
questioning eyes to Miss Schuyler.

Irrelevant as this question seemed to the two gentlemen, Miss Schuyler
answered it with feminine intuition: "And you, dear Mistress Thankful--"

"Have none," said Thankful; and here, I regret to say, she whimpered
slightly, at which Miss Schuyler, with tears in her own fine eyes, bent
her head suddenly to Thankful's ear, put her arm about the waist of the
pretty stranger, and then