Miss Schuyler, and so save the embarrassment he had dreaded for both.  To think was to act.  He related the facts of his birth and of his ancestry in the briefest possible manner, adding a description of his mother which would leave no question of the place she held in his esteem.  He then stated, with the emphasis of which he was master, that he distractedly awaited his dismissal, or Miss Schuyler’s permission to declare what he had so awkwardly concealed.

He sent the letter by an orderly, and attacked his correspondence with a desire to put gunpowder on his quill.  But Miss Schuyler was a tender-hearted creature and had no intention that he should suffer.  She scrawled him a hasty summons to come to her at once, and bade the orderly ride as for his life.  Hamilton, hearing a horse coming up the turnpike at runaway pace, glanced out of the window to see what neck was in danger, then flung his quill to the floor and bolted.  He was out of the house before the orderly had dismounted, and secured possession of the note.  When he had returned to his office, which was in a log extension at the back of the building, he locked the door and read what he could of Miss Schuyler’s illegible chirography.  That it was a command to wait upon her at once he managed to decipher, but no more at the moment; and feeling as if the heavens had opened, he despatched a hasty note, telling her that he could not leave his work before night, when he would hasten with the pent-up assurances of a love which had been his torment and delight for many weeks.  And then he answered a summons to Washington’s office, and discussed a letter to the Congress as if there were no such person in the world as Elizabeth Schuyler, as indeed for the hour there was not, nor for the rest of the afternoon.

But at eight o’clock he presented himself at the Cochraine quarters, and Miss Schuyler was alone in the drawing-room.  It was some time before they arrived at the question which had weighed so heavily on Hamilton’s mind.  When, however, they came down to conversation, Miss Schuyler remarked:—­

“I am sure that it will make no difference with my dear father, who is the most just and sensible of men.  I had never thought of your parentage at all.  I should have said you had leapt down from the abode of the gods, for you are much too remarkable to have been merely born.  But if he should object—­why, we’ll run away.”

Her eyes danced at the prospect, and Hamilton, who had vowed that nothing should induce him to enter a family where he was not welcome, was by now so hopelessly in love that he was ready to order the chaise and four at once.  He remained until Mrs. Cochraine sent him home, then walked up the hill toward Headquarters, keeping to the road by instinct, for he was deep in a reverie on the happiness of the past hours.  His dreams were cruelly shattered by the pressure of a bayonet against his breast.

“What?” he demanded.  “Oh, the countersign.”  He racked his memory.  It had fled, terrified, from his brain under the rush of that evening’s emotions.