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 dishonor? The Boston people took him and placed
him on his honor to live at Johnson Hall and do no meddling. And now
he's fled to Fort Niagara to raise the Mohawks. Is that honorable?"