“Eustace Singleton writes her naught but love-letters—let her keep them!” cried another girl. “Methinks I should not want the world to be reading my sweetheart’s letters and counting the kisses he sends me.”
“No, nor those he gives you,” said Martha Strudwick, with a merry wink, and instantly there was a great laugh, for the girl had been caught kissing her lover the winter day on which the troops had marched, for which imprudence her mother had soundly boxed her ears.
“And now,” cried Joscelyn, when the laugh had passed, “to prove that there is no treason in this letter, I shall let Betty Clevering—as good a Continental as the best of you—sit down yonder on the bench and read every word of it before I myself have seen it. Here, Betty, be you the judge whether what is herein writ is of treasonable import; and mind you skip nothing, particularly the love passages.” She laughingly pushed Betty upon the bench, and leaving Eustace’s letter in her hands, came back to Janet’s side.
“My letter was from my brother, Joscelyn; and he said he knew not where Richard had been sent. He himself is in the old Sugar House in New York; what he suffers he will not say, but we can guess, since so much has been said of the place.”
Joscelyn kissed the tearful face softly. “Perchance your imagination is over-vivid. It grieves me to the quick that any of our townsfolk should suffer.”
“It will be a great relief to his mother to know that Richard is not in the Sugar House.”
“Yes, there is only one worse prison in the country, and that is for the captured seamen.”
“Do not let us talk of its horrors.”
So the conversation went on until Betty Clevering, her face like a budding rose, came forward again.
“This letter,” she said, holding up the missive, “is one of friendship merely; in it I find absolutely nothing against our cause, save a curse on the war that keeps the writer from—from her he loves.”