These were pretty big words, and the Captain looked as though he thought so; but even a very little woman, when she is very much in earnest, sometimes finds language at her command quite as astonishing to herself as to her hearers. “Rights ought to be respected”—certainly that did sound remarkable. Hazel herself wondered where she had picked up so fine an expression, and one that suited so well.
“Who is Starlight?” asked the Captain, willing to digress a little from the main point.
“The owner of this house,” said Hazel, not willing to digress at all.
“Why, I thought it used to belong to Miss Avery; the property certainly stood in her name.” The Captain was careful to use only the past tense. According to his way of thinking, that Starlight homestead was just as rightfully his as though he had bought and paid for it.
And so Hazel said, “Good-by, Captain,” and the Captain bowed her out of his office as gallantly as though she had been a little princess. Four or five of the men had gathered on the porch outside, thinking to have a chat with her when she should have finished her errand with the Captain, but Hazel, absorbed in her own thoughts, was about to pass them by without so much as a word.
“Look here, Miss Hazel, aren't you going to speak to a fellow?” one of the men called after her. “Yes, of course I am,” Hazel replied, as though that had been her full intention, and, going back, held out her hand to Sergeant Bellows, the man who had called to her, and then, as it seemed to be expected of her, shook hands in a friendly way with the other men, all of whom she knew by name. But it was easy enough for the dullest among them to discover that her greeting lacked all its wonted cheeriness. Indeed, Hazel had not yet learned the need of disguising her real feelings, and always “carried her heart on her sleeve,” as the saying goes, so that you were at perfect liberty to share all its sentiments, whether of joy or sorrow. So it was not strange that for the third time she was questioned as to the reason for her evident depression. “Feeling a little down this morning, eh?” asked Sergeant Bellows.
Hazel nodded her head in assent. “There's nothing an old sergeant could do for you, is there, Miss Hazel?”
“Nor a corporal?” asked one of the other men.
“Nor a high private?” asked another. Hazel took their offers of assistance in perfect good faith, and would not have hesitated to call upon any or all of them, but she really did not see how they could be of any use to her, and shook her head hopelessly.
“No, I think not. The only man who can help me now is Colonel Hamilton, and I don't expect very much of him. What I came down for was to ask Captain Wadsworth if he would not let the people who own this house come back to it; but he does not think they own it at all any more, and I don't see what they are ever going to do. How would you feel, I'd like to know,” she asked, eagerly, “if you were an aunt and a little boy, and had to run away from your home, and, when you wanted to come back, found an English Captain living in it, who said he was going to stay there?” Some of the men looked as though they could not possibly tell how they would feel if they were “an aunt and a little boy,” but they were saved the embarrassment of being obliged to answer such a difficult question by Hazel's abrupt departure? She had suddenly spied a familiar hat lurking behind the shrubbery near the gate, and was off in a flash. “Good-by,” she called back, “some one is waiting for me.” Some one was waiting for her—some one had been waiting for her quite awhile and had grown rather impatient in the waiting.