So far as I remember, neither Jack nor Darthea betrayed by their manner what I learned naught of for so many years. Neither did my Aunt Gainor’s shrewdness get any hint of what passed at Cliveden. I recall, however, that Jack became more and more eager to rejoin his regiment, and this he did some two weeks later. My father’s condition was such as at times to alarm me, and at last I proposed to him to see Dr. Rush. To my surprise, he consented. I say to my surprise, for he had a vast distrust of doctors, and, to tell the truth, had never needed their help. The day after the doctor’s visit I saw our great physician, whom now all the world has learned to revere, and who was ever more wise in matters of medicine than in matters of state. He told me that my father was beginning to have some failure of brain because of his arteries being older than the rest of him, which I did not quite comprehend. He had, he said, losses of memory which were not constant. Especially was he affected with forgetfulness as to people, and for a time mistook them, so that for a while he had taken Dr. Rush for his old clerk Mason. The doctor said it was more common to lack remembrance of places. In my father’s condition he might take one man for another, and to-morrow be as clear as to his acquaintance as ever he had been; but that as to business, as was in such eases rare, his mind continued to be lucid, except at times, when his memory would suddenly fail him for a few minutes. The doctor saw no remedy for his condition, and I mention it only because my father’s varying peculiarities came in a measure to affect me and others in a way of which I shall have occasion to speak. My sense of his state did much to make me more tender and more able to endure the sad outbreaks of passion which Dr. Rush taught me were to be looked for. Nor was my aunt less troubled than I. Indeed, from this time she showed as regarded my father all of that gentleness which lay beneath the exterior roughness of her masculine nature. I observed that she looked after his house, paying him frequent visits, and in all ways was solicitous that he should be made comfortable. Near about the 1st of March--I am not quite sure of the date--I was asked in the absence of Major Clarkson, chief of the staff, to take his duties for a few days. I then saw how needlessly the general was creating enmities. His worst foe, Mr. Joseph Reed, had become in December president of the Council of State, and we--I say we--were thenceforward forever at outs with the body over which he presided. When at last, thoroughly disgusted, General Arnold was about to resign from the army, those unpleasant charges were made against him which came to little or nothing, but which embittered a life already harassed by disappointed ambition and want of means, and now also by the need to show a fair face to Mr. Shippen, whose daughter’s hand he had asked.