We can see the girl's bright eyes glisten as she listens to the tale of the day when the youth first left his home to journey to the city and to fame. His father and several neighbors accompanied him part of the way on the Strasburg road, which was then unsafe to travel without the protection of a score of muskets. In those days of pioneer life under King George the way from Springfield township to the City of Brotherly Love was a hazardous one, infested with bands of brigands constantly on the watch for travellers. As he pictures West flying through the forest pursued by outlaws, but at last outwitting them, her eyes stray to the young painter, who is talking with her sister. She views him with mingled emotions. Brave and valiant, he dashes before her on the charger of courage over the rough and rocky places of life. And then the face of Isaac Hunt comes to her mind in the guise of a handsome weakling. Her foolish infatuation for him is flickering and dying. What has he ever done like this man who has risen from a humble environment to a figure of consequence through the force of his own nature? The words of Morris have succeeded in exciting her interest.
West feels her gaze upon him and turns to look at her. She is wonderfully lovely in her shimmering gown. Their eyes meet and he goes to her. The vapors that Doctor Franklin's music could not dispel have vanished, and in their place the lights of love are all aglow for conquest.
Sarah Franklin was the life of her party that night. She even made her mother—good jolly home dame that few Philadelphia fine madams would have anything to do with—sing for the company. Perhaps she sang the quaint song Franklin composed for her some years after his marriage, called "My Plain Country Joan." If she did, she must have lingered with satisfaction over the last verses, in which "Pappy" paid a tribute to her worth:
"Were the finest young princess with millions in purse
To be had in exchange for my Joan,
I could not get better wife, might get worse,
So I'll stick to my dearest old Joan."
When the company rose and gathered in a group for the chorus, there were two who stole out into the cool entry. They were Betsey and West, the idealization of her former lover. There he finished for her the story that his early patron had begun. She heard of his life in Italy and the admiration his work excited. Through the great cities of Europe she strayed with him until they came to the small town of Reading, where, in a watchmaker's rose-embowered shop, his brother tinkered over fusees, ratchet wheels, and main-springs. In his words peace lingered along the village street, and she sighed over the charm of it.
When the chairs came the Franklin household stood on the doorstep and wished their guests "good-night and good rest." West helped Miss Shewell into her sister's vehicle, bound for Stephen Shewell's abode on Chestnut Street, where the Bickley party were to pass the night. After the carriers started he followed in the chair's shadow until he neared the alley which led to his lodging-place; there he turned and threw a kiss at it in the darkness. The girl's conquest was complete. The lights of love had burned him.
Betsey, seated by her sister in their slow-moving vehicle, was silent. As they passed the long rows of Cheapside houses, each like its neighbor, some new memory of the evening would come to her. Life seemed an intangible mystery with labyrinths of intricacies. She had found a lover strangely like Isaac Hunt in appearance, and yet so different. As she mounted the steps of her four-poster a little later she almost pitied her niece Mary.