And now, too, the British occupation of New York assumed its greatest proportions.  The kinds of festivity in which Margaret so brilliantly shone, lent to the town the continual gaiety in which she so keenly delighted.  The loyalist families exerted themselves to protect the king’s officers from dulness, and the king’s officers, in their own endeavours to the same end, helped perforce to banish dulness from the lives of their entertainers.  ’Twas a gay town, indeed, for some folk, despite the vast ugly blotches wrought upon its surface by two great fires since the war had come, and despite the scarcity of provisions and the other inconveniences of a virtual state of siege.  Tom and I saw much of that gaiety, for indeed at that time our duties were not as active as we wished they might be, and they left us leisure enough to spend in the town.  But we were pale candles to the European officers—­the rattling, swearing, insolent English, the tall and haughty Scots, the courtly Hessians and Brunswickers.

“What, sister, have we grown invisible, Bert and I?” said Tom to Margaret, as we met her in the hall one night, after we had returned from a ball in the Assembly Rooms.  “Three times we bowed to you this evening, and got never a glance in return.”

“’Faith,” says she, with a smile, “one can’t see these green uniforms for the scarlet ones!”

“Ay,” he retorted, with less good-humour than she had shown, “the scarlet coats blind some people’s eyes, I think, to other things than green uniforms.”

It was, I fancy, because Tom had from childhood adored her so much, that he now took her conduct so ill, and showed upon occasion a bitterness that he never manifested over any other subject.

“What do you mean, you saucy boy?” cried she, turning red, and looking mighty handsome.  “You might take a lesson or two in manners from some of the scarlet coats!”

“Egad, they wouldn’t find time to give me lessons, being so busy with you!  But which of your teachers do you recommend—­Captain Andre, Lord Rawdon, Colonel Campbell, or the two Germans whose names I can’t pronounce?  By George, you won’t be happy till you have Sir Henry Clinton and General Knyphausen disputing for the front place at your feet!”

[Illustration:  “SHE WAS INDEED THE TOAST OF THE ARMY.”]

She softened from anger to a little laugh of conscious triumph, tapped him with her fan, and sped up the stairs.  Her prediction had come true.  She was indeed the toast of the army.  Her mother apparently saw no scandal in this, being blinded by her own partiality to the royal side.  Her father knew it not, for he rarely attended the British festivities, from which he could not in reason debar his wife and daughters.  Fanny was too innocent to see harm in what her sister did.  But Tom and I, though we never spoke of it to each other, were made sensitive, by our friendship for Philip, to the impropriety of the situation—­that