“He seems to have a _penchant_ for assuming names,” Rose rejoined, playfully. “He called himself _John Brown_, at Washington, while to this little Pequot girl he was, let me see, what was it? Can’t you think, mother?” Rose was bent on talking about Jimmie and his Pequot girl, and knowing that she could not stop her, Mrs. Carleton replied: “Richard Lee, or something like that.” “Oh, yes, ‘Dick!’ I remember now; and her name was,—what _was_ it, mother? It makes my head ache so trying to recall it.” “If I ever knew, I’ve forgotten,” Mrs. Carleton said, and after trying in vain to think, Rose dismissed the name, but not the subject. “How angry Jimmie was,” she continued, “when you brought him home, and how awfully he swore. It makes you shudder, don’t it?” and she turned to Annie, who had shivered either with cold or horror at Jimmie’s profanity. “He was a bad boy once, but I most know he’s better now. Maybe, mother, this was a real nice girl and if you’d let Jimmie alone he might have become attached to her, and she have been his wife by this time. Then he would not have joined the Rebel army. Don’t you think you and Tom were a little too severe on Jimmie sometimes?” “Perhaps so,” was the faint response, as Mrs. Carleton looked out upon the wintry landscape, seeing there visions of a handsome, boyish, tearful face, flushed with anger and entreaty as its owner begged of her not to take him back to Boston, which he hated, but leave him where he was, saying that the little girl at the Pequot House had already done him more good than all the sermons preached from the pulpits of the Bay State Capital. But she had disregarded Jimmie’s wishes, and from that time forward he had pursued a course of recklessness ending at last in prison. With a half-regretful sigh Mrs. Carleton thought of all this, and in her heart she blamed herself for some of her boy’s disobedience. But it could not now be helped, and with another sigh, she turned toward Rose, still speculating as to what the result might have been, had Jimmie been suffered to follow up his first, and so far as she knew, only fancy. “What do you suppose would have happened if Jimmie had staid in New London, and this scheming aunt, whom mother feared far more than the Pequot, had staid there too?” she asked of Annie, forgetting that the particulars of the affair had not been repeated. But it did not matter, for Annie answered all the same. She was sitting now with her back to Mrs. Carleton, while, so far as Rose was concerned, her face was in the shadow. Consequently Rose could not see its expression, as she replied: