The old family sleigh moved sedately along the hard, snow-packed road, the moon making a shadowy, grotesque mass of it along the high drifts, while Leet, enveloped in furs, sat soberly erect, full of the importance now attaching to him. When they were well on their way, a body of mounted Britishers swept by, evidently bound for the town; and Joseph Devereux remarked to his son, as the two sat opposite one another, while Dorothy, riding backwards with her brother, seemed lost in the contemplation of the snowy fields they were passing, "I trust, Jack, those fellows will stir up no trouble this night." "They are most likely to do so," was the low-spoken reply; "for you know the mere sight of their red coats acts upon our men much as the like color affects an angry bull." "I wish they might be ordered from the Neck," observed Aunt Lettice, who sat alongside her brother-in-law, and had caught enough to guess at the rest of the talk. "They must wish so themselves, by this time," Jack said with a laugh. "It must now be rarely cold quarters for them over there." "Why did you not ask them to your wedding, Cousin Jack?" The question came from small 'Bitha, who was sitting between Dorothy and her brother. "I wonder if the one Mary pushed over the rocks last summer would not like to see her married?" "'Bitha!" Dorothy exclaimed sharply, seeming to awaken to what was being said. "Why will you always put it so? Mary did not push him over; he fell himself." "Aye,--but, Cousin Dot, he fell over while he was stepping back from her," the child answered. "She looked so angry that I think he was sorely frightened." Dorothy did not reply; but her brother said gayly, "Well, 'Bitha, I hope Mary will never look at me in a way to frighten me so much as that." "She never would," 'Bitha asserted with confidence, "for you are not a Britisher." "What a stanch little rebel it is," Joseph Devereux said laughingly; and Jack went on in a teasing way to 'Bitha, "I expect we shall all go to see 'Bitha married to a redcoat as soon as she is big enough." "You will see no such thing, Cousin Jack," the child replied angrily. "I'd run away, so that no one could ever find me, before I'd do such a thing. Would not you, Cousin Dorothy?" Dorothy did not answer, and 'Bitha repeated the question. "Would I do what, 'Bitha?" Dorothy now asked, but indifferently, and as though with the object of quieting the child. "Why, marry a redcoat?" "Nonsense, 'Bitha,--don't let Jack tease you." And Dorothy turned away again to look off over the snow fields through which they were passing. But she wondered if the others noticed how oddly her voice sounded, and what a tremble there was in it. The Horton house loomed up full of importance from amid its darker fellows, and warm lights twinkled out here and there where a parted curtain let them through to shine forth like welcoming smiles into the cold night.