Even a lecture from Richard, to whom she was much attached, did her no good; for all the while he was speaking she sat studying the effect of her high-heeled shoe on Betty's blue footstool, and answered his peroration about Billy's broken heart with the utterly irrelevant assertion that Frederick Wyley said she had the prettiest foot in the colonies. Did Richard agree with him? So Billy's cause was not advanced any, and Richard began to advise him to think no more of this yellow-haired tormentor. "I declare, Billy Bryce looks like a child with perpetual cramps," Mistress Strudwick exclaimed to Joscelyn one day, when the lad passed the window where the two sat; and then she glanced down the room to her medicine-box. "But it is a course of sweets, not bitters, that he needs," laughed Joscelyn. "It's his heart and not his stomach that ails Billy." "Half the lovesickness in the world is nothing but dyspepsia; mighty few cases of disappointed affection outlast a torpid liver." "I never heard you make such an unsentimental remark." "You never heard me tell such a truth. Bone-set and senna is the thing for Billy, and I'll see that he gets a bottle; if it does not cure his disappointment, it will at least kill off that particular brand of long face he is wearing. No wonder Janet turns up her nose at him." "Yes, I begin to think she is permanently at outs with him." Then other soldiers began to arrive. Thomas Nash got sick-leave from Washington's staff; and from the south came Master Strudwick, more anxious for a sight of home and wife than for the gold which the dissatisfied army was awaiting; and out of the north came Peter Ruffin, a weird wraith of his former self, to tell anew the horrible story of the prison-ships. The other Hillsboro' man, who had been with him had succumbed to the plague, and gone to swell the number of those at whose shallow graves the hungry sea was forever calling. "And Dame Grant?" asked Richard, when Peter came to see him. "She, too, fell a victim to the disease of the hulks, and sorely did we miss her. I knew you had escaped in safety, because one day she came to the ship wearing a new woollen hood, and when we twitted her about it over the rail, asking her if it was a lover's gift, she said that Dick Clevering's sweetheart had sent it to her out of gratitude from the south." "I helped to knit it," Betty cried, while Joscelyn's eyes were not lifted from the floor. In the semi-twilight of the room, Richard reached out and touched her hand gently. "It was like your generous heart." "But I made it out of the reddest wool I could find, with never a touch of blue or buff," she answered, laughing; but Richard was content.