Even as Sergeant Branderby had said, Kings and Queens had grown to be of less value now, so that, with the fading loyalty to the crown, there had diminished the regard of the New World for the Old. The dashing Stuart Kings had been beloved in a way, so had the simple-hearted, good Queen Anne, but these German princes who sat on the British throne, who possessed little power and who were half the time in Hanover, what bond had they with the Colonies? It was hard to be loyal to political governors, to the constantly changing ministers in London and to the Parliament that was ever piling up new laws that bore heavily on America. It was, therefore, to mend these difficult matters that Stephen Sheffield was begged to go to England. “Ah, well,” he said at last, coming to the end of a long argument with himself, “my strength is not much, but if it is of any worth to my Colony I may as well give it while I can.” So it happened that the little cottage that had once been Samuel Skerry’s had scarcely received its new French tenants before the great mansion on the hill was closed and its master had sailed away to England. Madame Jeanne Lamotte, or Mother Lamotte, as the Acadian woman came to be called in Hopewell, kept a watchful eye upon Stephen’s house and the negro servants who had been left to care for it. For the rest of the time, she was busy scrubbing and polishing in the shoemaker’s dilapidated cottage, and tending the rapidly-growing Clotilde. A merry, active little girl she soon grew to be, with yellow hair and great dark eyes, quick and dainty in her ways and looking, so the people of the village said, more like an infant angel than a foundling French child. Slow-sailing ships and slow-dragging politics kept Stephen long away, so that it was more than two years before he returned to America. He brought with him, when at last he came, a priceless document, signed by His Majesty King George the Second, and, what was of far greater worth, by the new and powerful Prime Minister, William Pitt, assuring the Colonies of their rights and privileges for a time at least. But even now his travelling was not at an end, for he made long journeys up and down the seacoast, preaching a new political doctrine of which he had begun to see the desperate need, namely union for all of America. If the colonists were to guard their freedom, they must learn to act together, to band themselves into a nation of their own. Friends remonstrated when they saw how much more frail and ill he began to look, how hollow his gay blue eyes were becoming and how grey his hair. But Stephen laughed like a boy at all they said, and put their warnings aside. “Grudge me not my share of the game,” he would say. “If the fighting comes, you that are staunchly built and mighty of limb will then have your turn and mine will be over. Let me do my part while the time allows.”