Branford.  I have not yet learned how to spell his Name, but you may Guess who I mean.  When are you coming home, Betty?  I want so to see your dear face.  My Respects to Gulian and Clarissa, and Obedience to Grandma—­I do not Recollect her whole Name.  My Sampler is more perfectly Evil than ever, but I have completed the Alphabet and I danced on it, which Miss Bidwell said was Outrageous naughty, but my temper Felt calmed afterward.  It has taken four Days to write this, farewell, from your lonesome little sister,

“FAITH WOLCOTT.

“Nota Bene.  I send my Love to You know Who.”

There were others of the Verplanck household who slept late that morning.  Gulian’s usually calm and somewhat phlegmatic temper had been moved to its depths by the startling and most unexpected revelation of Oliver Wolcott’s identity with the spy, whose escape Betty had aided and in which he was also indirectly implicated by the use of his horses and servant.  Gulian’s strict sense of justice told him that Betty was right in seizing the means at hand to rescue her brother, but that did not lessen his irritation at being used for anything which appertained to the Whig cause, for Gulian Verplanck was a Tory to the backbone.  Educated in England, brought up to consider that the divine right of kings was a sacred principle, he carried his devotion to the Tories to such an extent that had he foreseen the conflict between King and Colonies it is safe to say he would never have wedded Clarissa Wolcott.  His love for his wife was too great to permit him to regret his marriage, and he was too thorough a gentleman to annoy her by alluding to their political difference of opinion, except occasionally, when his temper got the better of him, which, to do him justice, was seldom.  But Clarissa’s very love for him rendered her too clear-sighted not to perceive the state of his mind, and the unspoken agitation which she suffered on this score had been partly the cause of her homesickness and longing for her sister’s companionship.  He had been both kind and considerate in sending for Betty; his conscience approved the action; and now to have this escapade as the outcome was, to a man of his somewhat stilted and over-ceremonious ideas, a blow of the most annoying description.

When he sallied forth from his house some two hours later than his wont, on his way to the wharf, where his business was located, he congratulated himself that he had so far escaped questioning from his wife on the occurrences of the night before.  When Betty left him, he had taken Kitty home in the sleigh, and refrained from lecturing her except so far as insisting upon her not mentioning the matter of Oliver’s escape to her mother.  Exhausted as she was, mirth-loving Kitty was moved to a smile as she listened to Gulian’s labored sentences, in which he endeavored to convince his listener and himself that what he considered almost a crime against the King’s majesty—­permitting