Chapter III

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"Yet 'tis a fine night, Gen. Sullivan," said Col. Hamilton, sharply nudging the ribs of his superior officer with his elbow. "There would be little trouble on such a night, I fancy, to track our ghostly visitant." Both of the ladies becoming interested, and Col. Hamilton having thus adroitly turned the flank of his superior officer, he went on, "You should know that the camp, and indeed the whole locality here, is said to be haunted by the apparition of a gray-coated figure, whose face is muffled and hidden in his collar, but who has the password pat to his lips, and whose identity hath baffled the sentries. This figure, it is said, forasmuch as it has been seen just before an assault, an attack, or some tribulation of the army, is believed by many to be the genius or guardian spirit of the cause, and, as such, has incited sentries and guards to greater vigilance, and has to some seemed a premonition of disaster. Before the last outbreak of the Connecticut militia, Master Graycoat haunted the outskirts of the weather-beaten and bedraggled camp, and, I doubt not, saw much of that preparation that sent that regiment of faint-hearted onion-gatherers to flaunt their woes and their wrongs in the face of the general himself."

Here Col. Hamilton, in turn, received a slight nudge from Mistress Schuyler, and ended his speech somewhat abruptly.

Mistress Thankful was not unmindful of both these allusions to her faithless lover, but only a consciousness of mortification and wounded pride was awakened by them. In fact, during the first tempest of her indignation at his arrest, still later at the arrest of her father, and finally at the discovery of his perfidy to her, she had forgotten that he was her lover; she had forgotten her previous tenderness toward him; and, now that her fire and indignation were spent, only a sense of numbness and vacancy remained. All that had gone before seemed not something to be regretted as her own act, but rather as the act of another Thankful Blossom, who had been lost that night in the snow-storm: she felt she had become, within the last twenty-four hours, not perhaps ANOTHER woman, but for the first time a WOMEN.

Yet it was singular that she felt more confused when, a few moments later, the conversation turned upon Major Van Zandt: it was still more singular that she even felt considerably frightened at that confusion. Finally she found herself listening with alternate irritability, shame, and curiosity, to praises of that gentleman, of his courage, his devotion, and his personal graces. For one wild moment Thankful felt like throwing herself on the breast of Mistress Schuyler, and confessing her rudeness to the major; but a conviction that Mistress Schuyler would share that secret with Col. Hamilton, that Major Van Zandt might not like that revelation, and, oddly enough associated with this, a feeling of unconquerable irritability toward that handsome and gentle young officer, kept her mouth closed. "Besides," she said to herself, "he ought to know, if he's such a fine gentleman as they say, just how I was feeling, and that I don't mean any rudeness to him;" and with this unanswerable feminine logic poor Thankful to some extent stilled her own honest little heart.