CHAPTER XIX.
THE WEARING OF A RED ROSE.
“She gives thee a garland woven fair,
Take care!
It is a fool’s-cap for thee to wear,
Beware! Beware!
Trust her not.
She’s fooling thee!”
—Longfellow.
The winter that followed was a quiet one in Hillsboro’. Joscelyn sewed at the flaming poppies of her embroidery during the mornings, rode with Betty or Mary Singleton over the commons in the afternoons when the snow was not too deep, and in the evenings played cribbage with her mother or sang to the sound of her spinet in the fire-lighted parlour. Now and then news of the outside strife came over the mountains or out of the far reaches to the north and east; but the red wave of war spent itself before it reached the inland town. Washington was jealously watching the British in New York, and in the south the fate of Charleston was rapidly being sealed, while now and then a soldier, coming home on furlough or sick leave, brought tidings of the partisan warfare, ceaselessly waged through the Carolinas and Georgia by Sumter and Marion and other bold leaders; but Hillsboro’, upon the Eno, dozed through the long winter months.
“This war is worse than tiresome; it’s perfectly hateful,” Janet Cameron said, twisting her yellow curls about her fingers and pouting disconsolately; “it is making old maids of us whether the men wish it or not. Here I am, eighteen this coming Whitsuntide, and not a genuine suitor have I had.”
“Fie, Janet! Where is Billy Bryce?” asked Joscelyn, in whose room the two sat. “Billy has loved you from your pinafore days.”
“That baby?” with a scornful accent.
“You did not use to think him such a baby.”
“Perchance not; for he is a whole six months older than I, and that is a mighty age!”