Then she paused in self-surprise.
"What is there inside me," she asked, "that leaps up with such strength whenever I say 'I will?' And what makes me say it? Have I strange, hardy blood in my veins making me want to fight? I do want to fight! They tell that boys twelve years of age are shouldering guns and rushing into battle at Boston. A gun I would shoulder this very night and march forth to fight those redcoats were I a boy. I am but a maid of fourteen years, but something I would gladly do for my country, and, alas! for my Fairy Prince."
She put her red-gold head down on her arms, which were folded across her knees as she sat up in bed, and for several moments she neither spoke nor stirred.
All at once, as though some one had touched a match to a pouch of powder, up she started, her eyes wild with excitement.
"I have it!" she exclaimed, springing softly to the floor, "I have it! May I but have the luck I crave, and my Dream Prince shall go free!"
What she meant to do her red lips did not utter. But she dressed plainly and carefully, and from a drawer she took a piece of black lace and wound it about her head and over her forehead.
Down-stairs she crept, and in the porch put on a long, straight coat worn by the parson when for exercise he worked in the garden, and on her head she put an old straw hat with a broad rim, half shading her face.
Then she passed out at a rear door that was not locked, and walked into the road with a long, careless stride.
The colored boys were often thus seen going from place to place late at night. And with her goldy hair pressed under the dark lace, her face partly covered by the big hat, and the coat closely buttoned and reaching nearly to her heels, Sally might well have been taken for a tall boy bound on an errand, or striding homeward from a late dance.
She made straight for Ingleside, reaching it from the parson's at a point below the stables, and, oh, joy! she nearly cried out with delight.