The husband and the brother soon after obtained permission to visit the one his wife, and the other his sister; and something resembling peace of mind, on one subject at least, returned to the patient Lady Helen, while with a mother's pride she put into the arms of her brother her only child, Seymour Pendarves, to whom, unpermitted, she had given the name of her family, and who was then seven years old. But now a _new_ source of anxiety was opened upon her. Her husband was become a soldier, and she had to fear for his life; nor was she in a state to follow him to battle, as she would otherwise have done, because she had lately been confined with a dead child. My mother was in this respect more fortunate; for she was able to accompany her husband to the seat of war, and she persisted to do so, though both my father and his cousin earnestly wished her to stay with Lady Helen and myself, I being at that period only two years old. But my mother had set up her husband as the only idol whom she was called upon to worship, and before that idol she bowed down in singleness of adoration; nor could the inconvenience to which her resolution exposed him at all shake her constancy. She was equally insensible also to the anxiety which her leaving Lady Helen at such a time occasioned, both to the husband and the brother of that amiable being. The reply of, "It is my duty to accompany my husband as long as I can," silenced all objections from others, and all the whisperings of her own affectionate heart; and she tore herself away, though not without considerable pain, from the embrace of her friend, and committed me to her maternal care. Dreadful was the moment of separation between Lady Helen and her husband: but the former bore it better than the latter; for, as her mind was impressed with the idea that she had deserved her afflictions, she believed that by patient submission to the divine will, she could alone show her sense of the error which she had committed. Yet, independently of the violence thus done to the enjoyment of affections, it was impossible for a feeling heart and a reflective mind to contemplate that awful moment without agony--that moment, when brother was about to arm against brother--when men speaking the same language, and hitherto considering themselves as subjects of the same king, were marching in dread array against each other, and breathing the vows of vengeance against those endeared to them perhaps by habits of social intercourse and the interchange of good offices. Such was the scene now exhibited at Lexington, in the April of 1775; for there the _first_ blood was spilt in the American contest.