He and I had begun to discuss ways and means of getting back to Virginia. One day, as usual, he was sitting beside me in the parlor after dinner, and, as usual, we were talking together in low tones, and again, as usual, the parlors were full. At one end of the room sat Major Brooks and Colonel Whipple, honoring us now and then with the covert and curious observation to which I could never become hardened. Captain Hosmer was walking restlessly up and down the floor, and casting uneasy glances toward us. He was too much of a gentleman to catechize me about my friend, but I knew he was not only curious but concerned in regard to my intimacy with Captain Locke.
Captain Locke was saying to me that he was in favor of our taking some schooner going down the bay and landing somewhere in Gloucester County, when I became so painfully conscious that the eyes of the enemy were upon us that I could not attend to what he was saying.
“What is the matter with you?” he asked. “You are not thinking at all of what I am saying. I reckon your mind is on Dan Grey.”
“I am thinking about you,” I said, on the verge of tears. “If you are not more careful, you won’t get back home at all, I’m afraid.”
“Why?” he asked innocently, and as if he were the most prudent person in the world.
“Only what Milicent and I have been telling you all along. You come here openly and boldly in the presence of all these Yankees. You visit us, and we feel responsible for any misfortune that might come to you through it. It is well known now, I think, by everybody in the house that we are Southerners and blockade-runners. No one in the house except ourselves and Mrs. Harris knows who you really are. Don’t you suppose people wonder?”
He had been introduced several times to ladies as Mr. Moore, but we had not introduced him generally. We did not know what to do with him. For ourselves, we felt safe by this time, but I never sat on that sofa by Captain Locke’s side without the fear in my heart that a sergeant-at-arms might walk in and lay hands on his shoulder.
“Don’t you see,” I went on, “how Captain Hosmer is watching you?”
For Hosmer was watching him with a scrutiny which could be felt in spite of all his courteous efforts at concealment. “And can’t you see with what suspicious looks those officers across the room regard you?”
“That’s so. You must introduce me to some of these people.”