For a moment the girl stood motionless, her slender forefinger crook’d in thought across her lips.  Then she glanced at me; the pink spots on her cheeks deepened, and her lips parted in a breathless smile.

“It will give me a pleasure to do honour to any wish expressed by anybody,” she said.  “Am I to compose a toast, Euan?”

I gazed at her in surprise; Major Parr said loudly:  “That’s the proper spirit!”

And, “Write for us a toast to love!” cried Boyd.

But Lana coolly proposed a toast to please all, which, she explained, a toast to love would not by any means.

“And surely that is easy for you,” she added sweetly, “who of your proper self please all who ever knew you.”

“Write us a patriotic toast!” suggested Captain Simpson, “——­ A jolly toast that all true Americans can drink under the nose of the British King himself.”

“That’s it!” cried Captain Franklin.  “A toast so cunningly devised that our poor fellows in the Provost below, and on that floating hell, the ‘Jersey,’ may offer it boldly and unrebuked in the very teeth of their jailors!  Lord!  But that would be a rare bit o’ verse—­ if it could be accomplished,” he added dubiously.

Lois stood there smiling, thinking, the tint of excitement still brilliant in her cheeks.

“No, I could not hope to contrive such a verse——­” she mused aloud.  “Yet—­ I might try——­” She lifted her grey eyes to mine as though awaiting my decision.

“Try,” said I—­ I don’t know why, because I never dreamed she had a talent for such trifles.

For a second, as her eyes met mine, I had the sensation of standing there entirely alone with her.  Then the clamour around us grew on my ears, and the figures of the others again took shape on every side.

And “Try!” they cried.  “Try!  Try!”

“Yes,” she said slowly.  “I will try——­” She looked up at me. “——­ If you wish it.”

“Try,” I said.

Very quietly she turned and passed behind the punch bowl and into the next room, but did not close the door.  And anybody could see her there, seated at the rough pine table, quill in hand, and sometimes motionless, absorbed in her own thoughts, sometimes scratching away at the sheet of paper under her nose with all the proper frenzy of a very poet.

We had emptied the punch bowl before she reappeared, holding out to me the paper which was still wet with ink.  And they welcomed her lustily, glasses aloft, but I was in a cold fright for fear she had writ nothing extraordinary, and they might think meanly of her mind, which, after all, I myself knew little of save that it was sweet and generous.

But she seemed in no manner perturbed, waiting smilingly for the noise to quiet.  Then she said: 

“This is a toast that our poor tyrant-ridden countrymen may dare to offer at any banquet under any flag, and under the very cannon of New York.”