My father’s eyes strayed from me to Mr. Leonard, who rose to his feet at once. “Perhaps I may go to my room,” he said. “I am not as young as I once was; and this journey——”

We protested; but he was firm, in his smiling, silent way; and so my mother showed him to his room—the southeast room, facing down river. That was our best room, the walls painted with hunting scenes by a German painter from Dresden on the Kennebec. He must have been colorblind; for he painted a yellow sky on the hunting scenes; but we liked the yellow sky, all of us, and the room was called the yellow room, which shows that one can become accustomed to anything, no matter how strange it may be.

“It’s just as well,” my father said, when Mr. Leonard was gone. “Let him get rested up. He’s all right, of course, being such a helpful friend of yours; but we’ll all feel more comfortable with him out of sight and sound. You get in the habit of being careful after what’s happened.”

“Happened where?” Nathaniel asked.

My father drank his flip, went to the window and looked both up and down the road: then resumed his seat. “I don’t know whether you heard what happened to the Bostonians that sympathized with England when the English left Boston six weeks ago.”

“We’ve heard nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”

“They had to crowd aboard sloops and schooners and pinks,” my father said, “men, women and children—thousands of ’em—not a stitch of extra clothes or a mite of food or furniture or anything—and put to sea that way. Taken to Halifax, they were, and pushed ashore to live as best they could; and every last scrap of their property in Boston seized by our folks. Every last scrap!”

We stared at him.

“Over at York,” he went on, “Judge Sayward, Judge of Probate, talked too much. You ought to do things according to Constitutional forms, he said: not go against law and order the way our folks were doing. They mobbed him—manhandled him! He can’t go out of his house. He isn’t allowed to leave town. Folks won’t speak to him. Folks won’t speak to his family. He just sits and shakes for fear they’ll mob him again.”

“You mean he wasn’t allowed to say what he thought?” Nathaniel demanded.

My father smiled grimly. “Why, no! He was allowed to say what he thought, but he was encouraged not to keep on saying it.”

Nathaniel looked incredulous. “I’ll be damned if I’d let——”