"I do not know," said his father, sombrely, "I do not know. God knows there's no reason--but there. I only know where the De Lanceys will stand--if it comes to more than speechifying. And their interest is mine." "But why must your interest go with any other man's interest?" said Andrew, touchily--the sting still in the old wound his father had reopened. "Because it must, boy. The one sure loser in any conflict is your neutral--and we're not patroons. It's lucky the Patroon's a minor--they'll be out of it whatever happens. They'd think me mad at the Coffee House if I told them what's at the back of my mind, but let a few years pass and--if your mother could see it as plain as I do and were better able to stomach the trials of a new venture--But 'tis little use talking of that and things may better somehow--You'll need a new fowling-piece and some light sort of gear--they say the sun is hot, though not deadly as it is in India--" So the conversation had flickered out into a discussion of Andrew's wardrobe and the climate, leaving him with a feeling of mingled insecurity and pride. The abrupt extinction of those long-cherished kinsfolk, the Beards of Westmoreland, rankled now and then, but he could feel no scornful challenge to the accepted dignity of the house of Beard in the air of the city; and a fowling-piece with silver mounts soon wiped out the freshness of the hurt. On the whole he was too anxious to acquit himself well and too awed by the vague magnitude of his responsibilities, to give excessive thought to the gentility of his lineage, or the lack of it. It occurred to him more than once that his father might be sending him away on a pretext to keep him from mixing too intimately with those friends of Lucius' who met every Thursday to drink toasts of a porcupine saddle, a cobweb pair of breeches and a long gallop to all enemies of Liberty. But even if the queer constraint of Lucius' farewell seemed to bear this theory out--he could not really believe in it when he thought it over. And it was equally impossible to believe with reason that his father actually considered abandoning the house on Wall Street and the cavernous storehouses by the docks for a palmetto-hut by a white-shawled strip of sand just because a row of wigs in a vague House of Parliament over the water had decided to impose a duty on certain, small, black dried leaves. And yet-- The days of the voyage gave him time to follow many such speculations to no conclusion. Of only one thing could he be sure. The fabric of life had always seemed secure and definite before--now he felt it give under his feet like a floor of fresh pine-boughs and saw things begin to grow unfamiliar that had always been familiar as water and light.