At the moment, however, what he said brought him no trouble at all, but something quite different. Marie de Sabrevois gave him a sidelong look: as her eyes caught his, she smiled entrancingly. The effect was immediate. Nathaniel’s air of carelessness disappeared: his glance returned hers warmly. Nay, he seemed to need to memorize every soft curve and faint freckle of her pretty face. Then, when she turned toward me, he watched her as though his very life depended on missing no syllable of what she said.

“Did you hear them speak of Burgoyne—of the one they called Jack?” she asked me. “We’ve heard about him and his army, and it does not amuse us. Have you heard about it yet?”

“No.”

“I think it must be true, what Germain was saying,” she murmured, lifting sad eyes to mine. “The troops under Burgoyne are the best and bravest in the entire British army, and with them are going the most skillful officers. Our poor Americans will be able to do nothing against them. There’ll even be Hessian troops with Burgoyne: great fighters.”

“Hessians! Do you mean Germans?”

She nodded. “Under a general as fine as Frederick the Great, I’m told. And they say Indians will fight with him too: five thousand of them! It means the end of the war, you shall see! I mean, I’m afraid that’s what it means.”

The thought of so powerful and deadly an army howling and roaring down on our small towns and our defenseless people gave me a shivery feeling along my spine. But I sought not to believe such a thing possible. “Five thousand Indians!” I cried. “Why, there aren’t that many anywhere in the east! They’d have to use western Indians! They wouldn’t dare! That means”—I hesitated, thinking of the black forests that rise up from the opposite bank of our river in Arundel, and of my mother and my three sisters in the very shadow of the pointed pines—“that means we’ve got to go home.”

“Home?” Nathaniel asked. “But Father said we were to stay.”

“Not in this last letter,” I said brusquely, and was sorry I had spoken; for Nathaniel was immediately indiscreet.

“Ah! So he wants us to come home,” he said. “I suppose you’re planning to take the first ship we can get?”