kittenish way with her which invites a caressing patronage, but, as he
learned, she had also the kittenish equipment for resenting
over-condescension; and she never took him half so much as when she
showed the high spirit that was in her, and defied him most.

For here and now, it was all well enough; but he had a future to which
he owed much, and a conscience that would not leave him at rest. The
fascination of meeting her so familiarly under the same roof, the
sorcery of the constant sight of her, were becoming too much; it would
not do on any account; for his own sake he must put an end to it. But
from hour to hour he lingered upon his unenforced resolve. The passing
days, that brought him doubts in which he shuddered at the great
difference between himself and her and her people, brought him also
moments of blissful forgetfulness in which his misgivings were lost in
the sweetness of her looks, or the young grace of her motions. Passing,
the days rebuked his delay in vain; a week and two weeks slipped from
under his feet, and still he had waited for fate to part him and his
folly. But now at last he would go and in the evening, after his cigar
on Durham Terrace, he knocked at Mrs. Ellison's door to say that on the
day after to-morrow he should push on to the White Mountains.

He found the Ellisons talking over an expedition for the next morning,
in which he was also to take part. Mrs. Ellison had already borne her
full share in the preparation; for, being always at hand there in her
room, and having nothing to do, she had been almost a willing victim to
the colonel's passion for information at second-hand, and had probably
come to know more than any other American woman of Arnold's expedition
against Quebec in 1775. She know why the attack was planned, and with
what prodigious hazard and heroical toil and endurance it was carried
out; how the dauntless little army of riflemen cut their way through the