When Stephen returned at mid-morning of that same day, his horses steaming in the cold air and his two serving-men trailing out behind him, unable to keep up with the furious pace their master had set, he found that, for the first time, there was no one at the door to greet him. He had spent the night at a small town twenty miles from Hopewell and, on hearing at dawn of the successful British expedition, he had pushed forward with all haste, quite ignorant still of the happenings at his own house. His eyes opened wide at the sight of blue-coated soldiers scattered about his grounds, but he did not stop to question them. He came into the hall and found no one there, he mounted the stairs and on the landing met Mother Jeanne, who greeted him with such a torrent of incoherent French that he had not the slightest idea of what she sought to tell him. After looking in at several of the open doors, his expression of wonder growing every moment, he finally encountered Doctor Thorndyke, just coming downstairs after a lengthy examination of the wounded officer.

“In Heaven’s name,” said Stephen to him, “will some one tell me what is amiss in this house? I come home to find my garden in the possession of soldiers, Mère Jeanne apparently quite out of her senses, Clotilde asleep, a total stranger installed in my best bedroom and a scarlet coat, covered with blood, hanging over the back of a chair. Is all the world gone mad, or is it only I?”

The Doctor laughed.

“It is indeed somewhat disturbing,” he said, “to come home to a peaceful house and find a wounded prisoner of war, a young heroine whose praises every one is singing and a frantic Frenchwoman whom excitement seems to have robbed of all her English. But come downstairs, Stephen, and I will give you the whole story as well as I have managed to learn it from a dozen different people who all sought to tell me at once. The one who knows the most is up yonder in your guest room and will be unable to state his version of the matter for some time to come.”

In Stephen’s study, where Mother Jeanne, who had at last collected her wits a little, brought them breakfast, the Doctor related the story of the escape of Andrew Shadwell and the night’s adventures of Clotilde.

“She knew,” commented Stephen, when he heard of her toiling so late in the empty cottage; “she knew well indeed that, had I been here, I would never have permitted such a thing. She was making the most of my absence, the minx!”

When he heard how the English soldiers had marched past Hopewell unheard and unseen in the storm, and had brought the troublesome Tories safely away, he chuckled aloud and slapped his knee.

“We are well rid of Andrew Shadwell, the slippery rogue,” he said, “and this was, after all, the best way out of the situation. I wish the English joy of him. But when I overtook the troops from Boston this morning, I found them a disappointed set who had just learned that they had arrived a few hours too late. Their leader had naught to do but to march his men back again with as good a grace as he could, for the ship that brought the English troops was already far out to sea.”

When the Doctor reached that part of the tale dealing with the young Captain’s return to see that Clotilde was safe, he warmed to his task of storyteller.

“It was the deed of a gallant fellow,” he concluded, “and I would the boy were not so sorely hurt. I find I have a friendly feeling for him, not only on account of his courage but because of his resemblance to you. Even as he lies there, white and unconscious, he has a familiar look that strikes me as uncanny. Just go and see for yourself, if you do not believe me.”

Stephen mounted the stairs once more and stepped into the room where the wounded soldier lay. Bidding the Doctor’s servant, who watched beside the bed, to draw aside the curtain, he stood for some time gazing at the white face on the pillow. Then he turned, without a word, and went back to his waiting friend.

“I will show you why his face is so familiar,” he said.

He led the physician into the dining-room and pointed to the portrait that hung in the place of honour above the sideboard. It was a picture of Amos Bardwell, painted in England and sent many years ago to Alisoun Sheffield. As was the somewhat unnatural fashion of that day, the artist had pictured the young man on horseback, his painted steed prancing, his cloak flying out behind him and his plumed hat held aloft in his hand. Behind him was the usual background of woods and distant cliffs crowned by a castle. Face and figure were so much like the young officer’s upstairs that it was small wonder that Clotilde, when she saw him gallop down the road that October morning, had felt so sure she had seen him before. As Stephen and the Doctor looked at the portrait, both were thinking that it might have been meant for the wounded stranger himself, save that the picture was fifty years old and the young soldier was surely not half that age.

“Amos Bardwell!” exclaimed the doctor. “How happily we used to play together when we two were little eager lads and he was a big, kindly one. Do you mind how he taught us the game of ‘King William was King James’ Son’ and how you would never let us play it again after your friend the fat British Sergeant gave you the true history of King William and King James? Heard you ever what became of that doughty officer?”

“Sergeant Branderby?” said Stephen. “I fear that he perished the next year in the great Jacobite uprising, for I never heard news of him again. Do you remember his tales of the Low Countries to which we used to listen so breathlessly?”

The Doctor did not answer at once as he was still gazing at the picture.

“So this lad upstairs is Amos’ son!” he observed at last.

“His grandson, more likely,” Stephen answered, looking reflectively at the picture. “You forget, comrade, how time passes and that we were not boys yesterday. Amos’ only child was a daughter, of whom we lost all trace after he died, nor ever knew even whom she married. When I was in England, I went down to the little place in the country that was his home when he was not at sea: I saw his grave in the churchyard, but of his daughter I could get no news. The village people said only that she never came back there after her father’s death, but had, they thought, finally gone to dwell with some distant kindred in Scotland. One old woman had heard it rumoured that the girl had married one of these far-removed cousins, but she could not recollect the name.”

As they turned way from the picture, the Doctor said in a tone of misgiving:

“That boy upstairs seems a sturdy fellow, but my heart fails me concerning him, none the less. It will take skilled and faithful nursing to bring back to health a lad with one bullet lodged in his ribs and another gone through his knee. My man is with him now, but even he is not so good an attendant as is needed, while that old Frenchwoman who cared so well for you, Stephen, is now too old and prone to the losing of her wits. Who is to be the boy’s nurse I do not know.”

“Here is his nurse,” said a quiet voice in the doorway, and the two wheeled to see Clotilde standing there, gay and sweet as a flower after her long sleep and none the worse for her adventures.

“You? Why you are but a child!” exclaimed the Doctor. “Only last week, it seems to me, I saw you, a little maid, standing in that doorway with your white-frilled apron and your braided hair and with a smoking blunderbuss held in your hand as daintily as though it were a rose.”

Clotilde smiled, but soberly.

“That was more like seven years ago than seven days,” she answered, “and I am surely now a woman grown although I have failed somehow to reach a woman’s stature. I have wished often,” she added with a sigh, for this was a sore subject with her, “that I could have grown tall and stately like all of those of Master Simon’s kindred.”

“Whatever her age and size, she has done a woman’s work since the war began,” said Stephen. “And as for your height, my child, sigh not over that as being unlike the others. Radpaths, Bardwells and Sheffields, we are all proud to call you one of us!”

At which speech, Clotilde first dropped him a stately curtsey and then ran across the room to throw her arms about his neck.

It was a long, long time, as the Doctor had feared, before the young English officer made even enough progress on the road toward health to warrant them in hoping that he could be brought the whole of that toilsome way. Many weeks it was before his fevered mind became wholly clear, or the Doctor would permit his being questioned as to who he was and whether there was really reason for his resemblance to the portrait in the dining room. Upon the first day that he sat up, however, he put all doubts to an end by giving a full account of himself. Not only did he prove to be of Stephen’s kindred and the grandson of Amos Bardwell, but his surname was the same as Master Simon’s. His mother had married a distant kinsman of Master Simon’s and the boy’s name, therefore, was Radpath, Gerald Radpath.

“And I am as proud of my Puritan ancestor as any of you Americans can be,” he said to Stephen and Clotilde as they sat beside his bed. “I have heard from my mother all the tales of that far journey among the Indians and how his daughter and my own grandfather, Amos Bardwell, dared to stand firm at the witch trial. But my knowledge of scenes and places was vague, having come through so many hands and I never dreamed, that night when I found Mademoiselle Clotilde that the place of our meeting was the shoemaker’s cottage and that the snow-covered scene of my disaster was Master Simon’s famous garden.”

“But how could you,” burst out Clotilde, “if you were of Master Simon’s blood, draw your sword against the Colonies and maintain the unjust cause of the King?”

Stephen held up his hand in warning against the speaking of such vigorous reproaches to a man weak and ill and propped up among his pillows for the first time. But Gerald Radpath only smiled.

“You forget, Mademoiselle,” he replied, “that we also were of your kin and that you drew your swords against us. Moreover, Master Simon was as loyal a subject of Queen Elizabeth and the first King James as am I, of King George. Did not his father, Robin Radpath, die in the effort to bear the great Queen’s message to the Emperor of Cathay? And I think you do not understand,” he went on more earnestly, “that we who came over to America in the King’s army had no very real knowledge of the cause in which we were fighting. Many such as I came up from the counties far from London, heard that beyond the seas was a company of ungrateful rebels who wished to make over our Parliament’s laws to suit themselves, and so threw ourselves headlong into our country’s service. We were amazed, later, to find that we were facing a spirited people who fought for a splendid cause, one that they, and even we ourselves in the end, knew was a just one. We had little taste for our task, most of us, before much time had passed; this I tell you freely since now I lie here wounded with no great chance of fighting again before the war is over. But I tell you also that, once having sworn allegiance to the King’s service, we will not turn traitors and betray his side to the enemy. His officers will fight on until a chance comes to withdraw honourably—we are not turncoats like Andrew Shadwell.”

“You are a good lad and a loyal soldier,” said Stephen, holding out his hand to clasp his cousin’s heartily. “A brave heart is a brave heart on whichever side it stands.”

“Had you ever had to do with Andrew Shadwell before?” inquired Clotilde, for she noticed his tone of extreme bitterness when he spoke of their Tory neighbour.

“That night my companions surrendered to the Colonial soldiers, and I managed to escape,” Gerald answered, “Andrew Shadwell hid me in his barn from midnight until dawn. Then he came out to say that he had decided to swear allegiance to the American cause, since fortune seemed to be against the English, and so he turned me out into the growing daylight. Nor would he even give me information as to the road, lest it should be held against him that he had given aid to the enemy. Later, when the tide of success seemed to have set in our direction again, he changed his party once more and clamoured for rescue so loudly that the British Commander, in return for some information that he had given, was obliged to comply with his request. The traitorous fellow had the grace to stammer and turn red when he saw who it was that had been sent to save him. Had he remained, he would have been a loyal citizen of the United States again, by now, I do not doubt.”

Andrew Shadwell, wherever he had taken refuge, must indeed have chided himself bitterly for fleeing to the English just when success seemed to have returned to the side of the Colonies. Victory was with the American arms all through the Spring, for the troops that had braved the horrors of the Valley Forge winter, found thereafter that the dangers of battle were small by comparison.

So, at least, did Miles Atherton explain the turn of fortune in the American favour. He had been sent by General Washington on some errand to Boston and had ridden down to Hopewell for a hasty visit to his family and to Stephen and Clotilde. It was a bright, sweet, warm June day that they sat together in the garden, when all the gayest birds were singing and all the softest breezes blowing—a day to which Clotilde long looked back with wistful memory.

Stephen had been ill and seemed now quite well again: that was one reason why she was so happy. His malady was one which he himself pronounced of no importance but over which the Doctor looked grave.

“These flutterings of the heart,” jested Stephen, “are less worthy of an old man than of a young maid. Were they Clotilde’s—”

“It is no matter for joking,” his old friend interrupted sternly. “Flutterings of the heart must be attended to or they will have grave effect.”

“You cannot frighten an old man whose span is almost completed,” returned Stephen. “Besides I will live to see the end of this long struggle; to do that I am determined.”

So the Doctor had gone out muttering anxiously to h............