“Yes, in one way it does, Miss Hazel,” said Colonel Hamilton kindly, “and the great strong men felt very sorry for her. Unfortunately hers proved to be a sort of test case. There are scores of other people who want to come back and turn people out of the homes where they have been living, some of them for the last six or seven years—indeed ever since New York fell into the hands of the British, and now the court has decided that they ought not to be allowed to come, and that under these circumstances, 'possession is not only nine points of the law,' but ten.
“I do not quite understand what you mean about the points of the law,” said Hazel, frankly; “but I do not think about it as you do at all,” and, in fact, there were many people in those days, and many, too, in these, who could make Hazel's words their own, never having been able to comprehend how it was that the great lawyer took the stand he did.
“Besides, it is queer,” Hazel added, after a moments cogitation, “that such a Whig as you are, Colonel Hamilton, should have sided with the Tories.”
“Not a whit more queer, it strikes me,” laughed the Colonel, “than that a stanch little Loyalist like yourself should be pleading so warmly for the Whigs.”
“But if your best friend was a Whig and you felt sorry for him?” pleaded Hazel, in extenuation.
“Well to be sure, that does put matters in a different light; but truly, I do not see what you are going to be able to do about it. If Miss Avery can fix matters up with Captain Wadsworth, all well and good, and—”
“No, she can never do that,” interrupted Hazel, decidedly. “I have seen Captain Wadsworth myself. He looks like a kind man, but he isn't. He told me to come to you about it; but it seems there's no use going to anybody, and I guess Miss Avery and Starlight will just have to live and die over at Paulus Hook, and never have a home of their own again—never!”
It must be confessed that Hazel's efforts in behalf of the Starlight homestead had apparently met with no success whatever. But she had done what she could, all she could, indeed, and there was some comfort in that, at least so she thought, as she walked slowly away from Colonel Hamilton's office. She paused in a meditative way as she reached the gate. “Poor little girl,” thought the Colonel, who sat watching her from his office window, “I fancy she had an idea I could go right up to Captain Wadsworth's and turn them all out if I wished to, and half believed I would do it. As it is, I will speak to the Captain. Perhaps he might be able to make some sort of a compromise with Miss Avery.”
So after all Hazel had at least succeeded in making a friend of the Colonel, and of Captain Wadsworth, too, for that matter, and it was not altogether improbable that something might result from this state of affairs, though she herself little dreamed it. But Hazel had had a double purpose in coming into the city that morning, and did not stand there at the Colonel's gate because, as the Colonel thought, she was the most sorrowful and hopeless of little suppliants, but because she was trying to decide just what she had better do next.