“Yes; and Eustace said some very pretty things about you and your pink frock. What a pity you are of different political beliefs, for—Why, Betty, what a beautiful colour has come into your cheeks.”

“Stuff, Joscelyn! But—what said Master Singleton?” And when the speech was repeated, the girl’s sweet face was redder than ever.

For a few moments Joscelyn looked at her in consternation. Betty cared for Eustace! It seemed the very acme of irony. Then tenderly she stroked the brown hair, wondering silently at the game of cross-purposes love is always playing. Uncle and Aunt Clevering, with their violent views, would follow Betty to her grave rather than to her bridal with Eustace, for, besides the party differences, the older folk of the two families had long been separated by a bitter quarrel over a title-deed. Joscelyn’s own friendship for Mary and Eustace had been the cause of some sharp words between her and her uncle; a thousand times more would he resent Betty’s defection. “But they shall not break her heart!” she said to herself, with a sudden tightening of her arms about the clinging girl.

An hour later Richard knocked at the door and was admitted by Mistress Cheshire, for Joscelyn had gone to her own room at the sound of his step outside.

“No, I will not come down. I have promised Betty not to quarrel with him, and the only way to keep my word is not to see him,” she said to her mother over the banister. “Tell him I hope he will soon come back whole of body, but as gloriously defeated as all rebels deserve to be.”

In vain her mother urged, and in vain Richard called from the foot of the stair; she neither answered nor appeared in sight.

“Tell her, Aunt Cheshire, that I never thought to find her hiding in her covert; a soldier who believes in his cause hesitates not to meet his adversary in open field; it is the doubtful in courage or confidence who run to cover.” And he went down the step with his head up angrily and his sword clanging behind him.

In the upper hall Joscelyn held her hands tightly over her mouth to force back the stinging retort. Then, with a derisive smile, she went downstairs and sat in the hall window, in plain view of the street and the house across the way.

That afternoon his company marched afield. The town was full of noise and excitement, and the mingled sound of sobbing and of forced laughter, as the line was formed in the market-place and moved with martial step down the long, unpaved street, the rolling drums and clear-toned bugles stirring the blood to a frenzy of enthusiasm. The sidewalks were lined with spectators, the patriots shouting, the luke-warm looking on silently. Every house along the route through the town was hung with wind-swung wreaths of evergreen or streamers of the bonny buff and blue—every one until they reached the Cheshire dwelling. There the shutters were close drawn as though some grief brooded within, and upon the outside of the closed door hung a picture of King George framed in countless loops of scarlet ribbon that flamed out like a sun-blown poppy by contrast with the soberer tints of the Continentals. Here was a challenge that none might misunderstand. The sight was as the red rag in the toreador’s hand to the bull in the arena; and, like an infuriated animal, the crowd surged and swayed and rent the air with an angry roar. The marching line came suddenly to a full stop without a word of command, and the roar was interspersed with hisses. Then there was a rush forward, and twenty hands tore at the pictured face and flaunting ribbons, and brought them out to be trampled under foot in the dust of the road, while a voice cried out of the crowd:—

“Down with the Royalists! Fire!”

And there was a rattle and a flash of steel down the martial line as muskets went to shoulders. But Richard Clevering, pale with fear, sprang to the steps between the deadly muzzles and the door and lifted a hand to either upright, while his voice rang like a trumpet down the line:—

“Stay! There are no men here. This is but a girl’s mad prank. Men, men, turn not your guns against two lonely women; save your weapons for rightful game! Shoulder arms! Forward! March!”

There was a moment’s hesitation, a muttering down the ranks; then the guns were shouldered and the column fell once more into step with the drums, while the crowd shouted its approval. But above the last echoes of that shout a woman’s jeering laugh rang out upon the air; and, lifting eyes, the crowd beheld Joscelyn Cheshire, clad in a scarlet satin bodice, lean out of her opened casement and knot a bunch of that same bright-hued ribbon upon the shutter. With the throng in such volcanic temper it was a perilous thing to do; and yet so insidious was her daring, so great her beauty, that not so much as a stone was cast at this new signal of loyalty, and not a voice was lifted in anger.

And this was the last vision that Richard had of her—the vivid, glowing picture he carried in his heart through the long campaigns, whether it was as he rushed through the smoke-swirls of battle or bivouacked under the cold, white stars.

CHAPTER III.

ONWARD TO VALLEY FORGE.

The colony of North Carolina had long been ready for rebellion against kingly authority. Governor Tryon had sown the seeds of discontent by his unpopular measures, and the taxes levied upon the people that he might build his “palace” at New Berne. This discontent had culminated in the insurrection of the Regulators and the battle of Alamance, where was made the first armed stand against England. But Tryon was victorious, and the captured leaders of the insurrection were hanged on Regulators’ hill in Hillsboro’-town. But from that field of Alamance, the defeated people carried to their homes the same persistent, haunting dream of liberty which was to rise incarnate when the tocsin of the Revolution blew through the land.

That tocsin waked many an echo among the hills that surrounded the town upon the Eno. At the first call to arms, the older men had gone to the field, some marching away to the north, others serving under the partisan leaders throughout their own section. Now the younger ones—those who had been but boys when the cannon at Lexington made the pulse of the people first to quicken and throb—were going out to bear their share in the fray.

For the past year the company of which Richard Clevering was a member had done service in the militia at home, keeping the Tories in a semblance of subjection, and now and then going to Sumter’s aid when he made one of those electrical sallies which were like lightning flashes amid the general storm. In this hard school Richard had learned his first lessons in soldiering; but graver and sterner military work was now ahead, for the company was marching northward to aid in recruiting Washington’s regular army, reduced and discouraged by the terrible winter at Valley Forge.

When they started, the willows that fringed the Eno, that fierce little river that winds about Hillsboro’, had already lost their winter grayness, and, with the rising of the sap, had taken on that wonderful golden brown which is the aureole of the coming springtime. The bluebirds had not yet come back to the fence corners, but the earth was soggy with the thaw, and from under the whirls