As a natural opposite of her father, she had felt loyalty where he exhibited disloyalty; his attitude toward the United States had compelled her to a love for her country which otherwise might have lain as dormant as it seemed to lie in the majority of men and women about her. But her father quickened it, and she nursed it. It was not in her to do things by halves, and inevitably she became fiercely, flamingly patriotic.... Perhaps girlishly patriotic; patriotic with immature enthusiasm.... She brooded and dreamed. She saw herself frustrating her father's designs--but always without betraying him. She pictured herself discovering plots, and bringing them to futility with clever counter-plots. She pictured herself in possession of indisputable evidence of her father's guilt, and would sit painting to herself scenes in which she confronted him with it, compelled him to grovel for mercy, and wrung from him promises to abandon his sinister enterprises. But though she spied with what cleverness for spying was in her, she hit upon nothing tangible. Almost she came to believe there was nothing tangible to discover. The thing was never absent from her mind. How could it be? One cannot whistle away fear, shame, the sense of impending calamity which has its birth in such certain insecurity as was hers. When a nature, reckless, turbulent, headstrong--and feminine--is moved by such emotions as hatred, terror, black doubt, love of country, all conflicting, a dance, a game of cards, a novel, cannot bring forgetfulness nor ease of mind. It was wearing on her, chafing at those restraints which were naturally irksome to her. Hildegarde was being modified, as Potter had been modified, but the forces that acted upon her were far different from the forces which had worked upon him. To Potter, through enforced idleness, unavoidable thought, had come certainty and sureness of purpose, darkened and made saturnine through these last months by love that had come down about him in ruins. To Hildegarde came only more uncertainty, more anguish of mind. There was no light ahead; nothing was clear before her. The strain she underwent, the constant pressure of suspense, the tenseness of a most singular precariousness, all pulled her this way and that. How the thing would end with her none could say. It would change her; another woman would result, but what sort of woman? The answer depended upon the innate strength of her soul, the sturdiness of such virtues as resided in her.