"Who can foresee?" I answered. "It is war now, at last, war open and desperate. I can see no peaceful way out of it. These aristocratic landlords, these Johnsons, Butlers, Phillipses, De Lanceys, and the rest, will not give up their estates without a hard fight for them. Of that you may be sure. _They_ will come back, if their wives do not, and all that they can do, backed by England, to regain their positions, will be done. They may win, and if they do, it will be our necks that will be put into the yoke--or the halter. At all events, it has gone too far to be patched over now. We can only stand up and fight as stoutly as we may, and leave the rest to fate." "And it really was necessary to fight--I suppose it could not have been in reason avoided?" "They would have it so. They clung to the faith that they were by right the masters here, and we the slaves, and so infatuated were they that they brought in English troops and force to back them up. There was no alternative but to fight. Would you have had me on the other side--on the English side, Daisy?" "Oh, no, Douw," she answered, in a clear voice. "If war there must be, why, of course, the side of my people is my side." I was not surprised at this, but I said, "You speak of your people, Daisy--but surely mere birth does not count for more than one's whole training afterward, and you have been bred among another class altogether. Why, I should think nine out of every ten of your friends here in the Mohawk district must be Tories." "Not so great a proportion as that," she went on, with a faint smile upon her lips, but deep gravity in her eyes. "You do not know the value of these 'friends,' as you call them, as closely as I do. Never have they forgotten on their side, even if I did on mine, that my parents were Palatine peasants. And you speak of my being bred among them! In what way more than you were? Was I not brought up side by side with you? Was there any difference in our rearing, in our daily life until--until you left us? Why should I not be a patriot, sir, as well as you?" She ended with a little laugh, but the voice quivered beneath it. We both were thinking, I felt, of the dear old days gone by, and of the melancholy fate which clouded over and darkened those days, and drove us apart. We still stood by the open door, whence we had watched the carriage disappear. After some seconds of silence I essayed to bring back the conversation to Lady Johnson, and talked of her narrow, ill-informed, purely one-sided way of regarding the troubles, and of how impossible it was that the class to which she belonged, no matter how amiable and good they might be, could ever adapt themselves to the enlarging social conditions of this new country.