We were comfortably established at Burke's Inn, and, as always, baited well where food and bed were ever clean and good.
Penelope had the chamber next to mine; Nick slept in the little bedroom on my left; and the Saguenay haunted the kitchen, with a perpetual appetite never damaged by gorging.
All the news of town and country was fetched me by word o' mouth, by penny broadsides, by journals, so that I never wanted for gossip to entertain or alarm me.
Town tattle, rumours from West and North, camp news conveyed by Coureurs-du-Bois, by runners, by expresses, all this came to my chamber where I lay impatient, brought sometimes by Burke, often by Nick, more often by Penelope.
She was very kind and patient with me. In the first feverish and agonizing days of my illness I had sent for her, and begged her to take the first convenient waggon and escort into Albany, where surely Douw Fonda would now care for her and the Patroon's household would welcome and shelter her until the oncoming storm had passed and her aged charge should again return to Caughnawaga.
She would not go, but gave no reason. And, my sickness making me peevish, I was often fretful and short with her; and so badgered and bullied her that one night, in desperation, she wrote a letter to Douw Fonda at my request, offering to go to Albany and care for him if he desired it.
But presently there came a polite letter in reply, writ kindly to her by the young Patroon himself, who very delicately revealed how it was with Mr. Fonda. And it appeared that he had become childish from great age, and seemed now to retain no memory of her, and desired not to be cared for by anybody—as he said—who was a stranger to him.
Which was sad to know concerning so good and wise and gallant an old gentleman as had been Mr. Douw Fonda,—a fine, honourable, educated and cultivated man, whose chiefest pleasure was in his books and garden, and who never in all his life had uttered an unkind word.
This news, too, was disturbing in another manner; for Mr. Fonda had wished, as all knew, to adopt Penelope and make provision for her. And now, if his mind had begun to cloud and his memory betray him, no provision was likely to be made to support this young girl who was utterly alone in the world, and entirely without fortune.