"Oh, brother, were you as ill as this, when he took you from the Philadelphia prison?" said Jean, tender commiseration on her face.
"Weaker, I think, only I had passed the stage of delirium into which he slipped only a few days ago. But look at me now! See how robust I am!" and I lifted her by the elbows to the level of my face, kissed her and set her upon her feet again, adding: "Buford will soon be as sound, with yours and mother's nursing."
"His mother and sister nursed you?"
"They had me well-cared for. I was over the worst when they found me."
"We'll nurse him carefully, dear Donald, you may be satisfied of that. Is he, though, really a Tory? He looks like a gentleman," glancing toward him as she spoke, as if she half suspected Buford of possessing hidden tusks and horns like some fabled monster.
"And gentleman he is, only his opinions do not agree with ours"; whereupon I laughed so merrily at Jean's shocked face that mother signed to us to leave the room, lest we disturb her patient. "Aye, little sister," I continued, "prejudice is a most strange thing! 'Tis like a pestilence in the air, poisoning even the most innocent and pure-hearted. Heaven, Jean, I doubt not, is a place where thought is as free as God's smile, and conviction untrammeled, save by love and knowledge of truth. Such state would almost be heaven, methinks, without other concomitants."
Jean, though the sweetest of little women, and well endowed with common sense, and all needful womanly reason, cared not, like Ellen, to follow the twistings and wanderings of thought, so she took me straight back to our subject.
"And if Captain Buford gets well, Donald, will they hang him because he is a Tory?"
"Do you suppose, innocent one, that we but fatten him for the halter? Either he'll be exchanged, paroled, or discharged."
"Then he'll go back to fight more against us? Oh! Donald, I'm afraid I shall hate the poor man when he begins to get stronger, though he looks now so pitiable."