Some things were made plain to me on my chilly walk back to the southward, with its opportunity for quiet reflection. One was that I had not overrated Arnold’s appetite for flattery, which was in truth even grosser than I had imagined. Another developed out of the side-glimpse given me of the traitor’s domestic affairs. It was not passing strange that Arnold should not wish to have his family with him in the house in the lower town where, as Castner had told me, he ate and slept and had his regimental rendezvous. But I saw more than disinclination in the town-wide severing. It spoke eloquently of the traitor’s social isolation that Arnold should be only a daylight visitor at the house where his wife and child were, without doubt, the guests of family friends of the Shippens. I was wondering upon what footing he stood in this house, and if he were only tolerated there as he seemed to be elsewhere, when the recollection of the face I had seen at the upper window came to haunt and perplex me again. My last letter from Beatrix Leigh had pictured her hived up in the great house at Sevenoaks, in County Warwick, her father and brothers gone to the south with General Greene,--in whose campaign against Cornwallis she was patently more interested than she was in our humdrum New York fuse-sputterings,--and her mother and all the other women-folk of the tidewater homeland shuddering in anticipation of the long-threatened descent of the British upon the Virginia coast. She had given me no hint of any intended desertion of Sevenoaks, and though she had many friends in Philadelphia, where her schooling had been, I thought it the height of improbability that she would get even that far on the way to New York in these troublous times. Weighing all these things in the mental balance, I saw how absurd it was to let a momentary sight of a beautiful face at a window run me so far aside from the beaten path of calm reasoning. In sober fact the fancied identification proved nothing but this: that Beatrix Leigh’s face was so constantly present in my mind and heart that I was ready to find and adore it under any suggestive guise.