each evening, over his mulled wine in the King's Arms Tavern,
pictured and repictured the moment of triumph, when, with
the growing bundle of mortgages completed, he should ride to
Boxley and inform its occupant that he wished them paid.

"We'll show the old fox that he's got a ferret, not a goose,
to deal with," he said a dozen times to Phil,--a speech which
always made the latter look very uneasy, as if his conscience
were pricking.

This absence of father and lover gave Janice a really restful
breathing space, and it was the least eventful time the girl had
known since the advent of the bondsman nearly a year before.
Even he almost dropped out of the girl's life, for the farm-work
was now at its highest point of activity, and he was little
about house or stable. Furthermore, though twenty thousand
minutemen and volunteers were gathered before Boston, though
the thirteen colonies were aflame with war preparations, and
though the Continental Congress was voting a declaration on
taking up arms and appointing a general, nothing but vague
report of all this reached Greenwood.

In Brunswick, however, Dame Rumour was more precise,
and one afternoon as the bondsman rode into the town, with
some horses that needed shoeing, he was hailed by the tavern-keeper.

"Say! Folks tells that yer know how tew paint a bit?"
And, when Charles nodded, he continued: "Waal, we've
hearn word that the Congress has appinted a feller named
George Washington fer ginral, who 's goin' tew come through