“Schoolmates, at first, asked me to their homes.  I would not go because I could not ask them to my home in turn.  And so grew up to womanhood alone, and shy, and silent among my fellows; alone at home among the shadows of that old Dutch house; ever alone.  Always a haunted twilight seemed to veil the living world from me, save when I walked abroad along the river, thinking, thinking.

“Yet, in one sense I was not alone, Euan, for I was fanciful; and roamed accompanied by those bright visions that unawakened souls conjure for company; companioned by all creatures of the mind, from saint to devil.  Ai-me!  For there were moments when I would have welcomed devils, so that they rid me of my solitude, at hell’s own price!”

She drew a long, light breath, smiled at me; then: 

“My foster mother died.  And when she died the end also began for him.  I was taken from my school.  So dreadfully was he broken that for months he lay abed never speaking, scarcely eating.  And all day long during those dreary months I sat alone in that hushed house of death.

“Debt came first; then sheriffs; then suddenly came this war upon us.  But nothing aroused him from his lethargy; and all day long he brooded there in silence, day after day, until our creditors would endure no longer, and the bailiff menaced him.  Confused and frightened, I implored him to leave the city—­ jails seeming to me far more terrible than death—­ and at last persuaded him to the old life once more.

“So, to avoid a debtor’s prison, we took the open road again.  But war was ravishing the land; there was no work for him to do.  We starved slowly southward, day by day, shivered and starved from town to town across the counter.

“Near to a camp of Continental troops there was a farm house.  They took me there as maid-at-all-work, out of charity, I think.  My father wandered over to the camp, and there, God alone knows why, enlisted—­ I shall not tell you in what regiment.  But it was Continental Line—­ a gaunt, fierce, powder-blackened company, disciplined with iron.  And presently a dreadful thing befell us.  For one morning before sunrise, as I stood scouring the milk-pans by the flare of a tallow-dip, came to me a yawning sergeant of this same regiment to tell me that, as my foster father was to be shot at sunrise, therefore, he desired to see me.  And I remember how he yawned and yawned, this lank and bony sergeant, showing within his mouth his yellow fangs!

“Oh, Euan!  When I arrived, my foster father—­ who I then supposed was my own father—­ lay in a tent a condemned deserter, seeming not even to care, or to comprehend his dreadful plight.  All the defence he ever made, they say was that he had tired of dirty camps and foolish drums, and wished to paint again.  Euan, it was terrible.  He did not understand.  He was a visionary—­ a man of endless silences, dreamy of eye, gentle and vague of mind—­ no soldier, nor fitted to understand a military life at all.