Mr. Foster had re-entered the dining-room as soon as Tom had hidden himself in the clock case; therefore he neither saw nor heard what passed in the hall. The Tories came into the room, their swords clanking and their spurs jingling.
“It’s a good thing for you, Foster,” growled the huge man, whose name, by the way, was Clarage—a notorious bully and leader of a body of Major Gainey’s loyalists—“that we did not find any one lurking about the grounds.”
“You could not have done much worse than you have already done,” said Mr. Foster, bitterly.
“So you think,” put in Mark Harwood. “But we would have proven you wrong without loss of time, my dear sir; mind you that.”
“A long rope and a stout limb for the spy,” laughed Clarage; “and not to be any way mean, Foster, we would have given you a place beside him.”
Lucy Foster came in at that moment, and her eyes filled with renewed resentment as she heard these words addressed to her invalid father.
“How long, Mr. Clarage,” she asked, “is this to continue? My father is not strong, as you well know; your ruffianly behavior is making him ill!”
“Ah, it is the little rebel,” laughed Clarage, in his bull-like tones. Then he turned to Mark Harwood. “Do you know, Harwood, who she reminds me of as she stands there with her eyes flashing and her little hands clinched? Why, that cousin of yours—Laura, you know. Why man, it seems to me that all the prettiest girls in the colony are rebels.”
“But Laura will not remain one for any great length of time,” said Mark. “And neither would Miss Lucy, here, for all her angry looks, under like conditions.”
“Why, how is that?”