“And would you—­would you, if you were in Ephraim’s camp as a visitor,—­would you—­”

“Tell tales?” laughed Mr. Merridew.  “Indeed I would, if I heard anything worth telling,—­anything that I thought would save the cause I believed to be a righteous cause.”  Then, more seriously:  “Why, Sibyl, it would be my duty to do it.”

“Oh! oh!” cried Sibyl, “it is odious, odious, all this war business.”

“Yes, I grant you that; but who is to blame for bringing this odious business upon us?  Who but these foolish malcontents, these rebels, like—­”

“Like my father and my brother,” broke in Sibyl, hotly, as Mr. Merridew hesitated.

“Yes, like your father and your brother, I am sorry to say,” concluded her uncle, gravely.

“No, no, no!” cried Sibyl, excitedly.  “It is not they who are to blame.  They are good and brave and wise.  They only want justice and fair play.  It is the King’s folk who are to blame,—­the King’s folk who want to oppress the people with unjust taxes, that they may live in greater grandeur.”

Mr. Merridew stared in silent astonishment at this unexpected outburst.  Then, in a severer tone than his niece had ever heard from his lips, he said,—­

“So this is the treasonable talk you have heard from your brother; these are the teachings that he has been instilling into you?  Ah, it is none too soon that you are cut off from the influence of that headstrong boy.”

“But it was my father who instilled these teachings into my brother.  They are his principles, and they are my principles too!”

“Your principles!” and Mr. Merridew, his sense of humor immensely tickled at the sound of this fine word, that rolled off with such an assumption of dignity from those rosy young lips, burst into a great laugh.  Yet then and there he said to himself, “That Jackanapes of a boy, to fill her head with this treasonable stuff!  But we’ll see, we’ll see if we can’t crowd all such stuff out with livelier things when we have those fine doings at the Province House Sir William is talking of.  Her principles!  The little parrot!” and he laughed again.

CHAPTER II.

“And you’re to dance the last dance with me, remember, Miss Merridew.”

“Indeed, Sir Harry, I will not promise you that.”

“You will not promise?  But you have promised.”

“Have promised?  What do you mean, sir?  I think you are forgetting yourself!” and Miss Sibyl Merridew lifted up her graceful head with a little air of hauteur that was by no means unbecoming to her piquant beauty.

But young Sir Harry Willing was not to be put down by this pretty little provincial,—­not he; and so, lifting up his head with an air of hauteur, he said to Miss Sibyl,—­

“I crave Miss Merridew’s pardon, but perhaps if she will reflect a moment she will recall what she said to me yester morning when I begged her to give me the pleasure of dancing the last minuet with her to-night.”