“If I were the King,” the men would always say, or “if I were William Pitt,” or “if I were Governor of Massachusetts, I would do such—or such a thing and all would be well.” Once Stephen interrupted an address of this kind, when he came to the kitchen door himself, the completed letter in his hand. “There is much you can do in your own person, David Thurston,” he said quietly. “This is a time when every man must act for the public good without waiting until he become Governor or Prime Minister or King George the Third.” “God bless you, Master Sheffield, and I will strive to do as you say,” the man replied. He went away laughing, but with a new determination in his rugged face. A scarlet-uniformed soldier, bringing a letter from the Governor, sat upon the settle one day drinking gratefully, after his long ride, a great mug of home-brewed cider. He heard Clotilde speaking in French with Mère Jeanne and looked round at her in surprise. “How come you to speak that tongue as though you were born to it?” he asked. “There are not many of you New Englanders who have learned French.” “We are Acadians,” Clotilde told him, “and still cling to our own speech, although it is many years now since the brave English soldiers drove a harmless people from their homes.” “Ay,” answered the soldier without anger at her words, “that is a blunder for which England must answer some day. Wrong she did then, perhaps even greater wrong she is doing now, so that there has come between the New Country and the Old so wide a breach, I fear, that it will never be healed. Belike they will pour into the gulph a few thousands of us who wear the King’s red coat and that may end the quarrel and it may not. Time will tell—and that right soon.” Clotilde watched him ride away, cantering through the sunshine and dappled shade of the long, tree-bordered avenue, with a great rattling of spurs and creaking of saddle-leather. In spite of his words, and although both were thinking of the future, neither he nor she had the faintest dream of the strange circumstances under which they were to meet again.