Other news she used to hear, too, from Miles Atherton, who was a member of the Hopewell company of minute-men that drilled every morning in the town square. He was nearly a man now, still sturdy and square and slow of speech, but bearing the same stout heart as did his grandfather, the Hugh Atherton who dared to speak out for justice in the famous witch panic. Often, when he came of an evening, Stephen would call him into the study to question him as to how people thought and felt in the village, and how many had joined the band of minute-men. More often, when there was distinguished company with the master of the house and Clotilde had finished tending and serving the guests, she and Miles would walk in the garden, their tongues still busy with talk of the King and his ministers and the shameful tax on tea. They were only like all the rest of New England, where people could think and talk of but little now save the growing cloud that hung over the Colonies. There were no longer those brilliant, festive gatherings in Stephen’s dining hall, or laughing, gorgeously dressed companies grouped about Master Simon’s wide fireplace in the drawing-room. Instead, grave-faced men would sit late into the night around the table in Stephen’s study, sit so long indeed that more than once Clotilde, slipping down to begin her work in the first faint light of dawn, had found them still in their places, the table covered with guttering candles and strewn with papers, the faces of all looking white and weary and worn. On one such occasion Stephen heard her pass the door and called her in to find some papers that he had been unable to get together himself. In spite of the long discussion, the talk was still going on as she stood searching in the carved press. “I tell thee, friend,” a stout grey-coated stranger was saying, “England forgets that for long years she has sent the freedom-lovers to America to be rid of them and has granted them many liberties as a bribe to them to stay there. Now, in the third and fourth generation, the Mother Country seeks to take back these privileges and to make us law-ridden and yoke-bound like her own Englishmen, who have stopped at home. It is a mistake that will cost the King dear.” “Yea,” ejaculated a man beside him whose black clothes indicated that he was a minister. “They sowed the wind, they will reap the whirlwind!” The black-clad gentleman, it seemed, was on the point of delivering a long sermon upon this text had not Master Sheffield, taking up the papers that Clotilde gave him, rather adroitly cut the dissertation short, at which the stout Quaker chuckled behind his hand. Later in the morning Clotilde stood by Stephen in the porch watching the broad back and wide grey hat of the stout visitor as he and his plump, ambling white horse disappeared down the avenue.