Once arrived on English soil, it is far from strange that the lively mariner should have longed for a glimpse of old haunts. The circumspect gentlemen in Paris would hardly have smiled, however, upon their emissary’s sally into the heart of London; and his visit to his friends the Jumps, at their house in Stepney Causeway, spoke little for his sense of responsibility. Mrs. Jump, Hynson’s friend, received him with tender rejoicing. Robert, her son, echoed the welcome, and pretty little Miss Cleghorn, neighbor and intimate of the household, promptly surrendered her heart to the handsome sailor. Hynson, “a lusty and a black-looking fellow,” with a salt-water gallantry very potent in the feminine eye, warmed under influences so generous. Discretion melted within him, and before his departure for Dover he had acquainted his hostess with the secret in his charge. Anxiety as great as her affection now filled the good woman’s mind. Sympathizing in private with the American cause, she yet dreaded so dangerous a service for one she loved. And when, in the newness of her trouble, Mr. Vardill, an American clergyman supposedly “disaffected,” chanced to call upon her, her distracted wits could not conceal from his astuteness quite all that loyalty to Hynson demanded. As Fate would have it, this Vardill, good rebel though he seemed to be, lived, as a matter of fact, “chiefly on his Majesty’s bounty.” Windfalls such as Mrs. Jump had provided might be turned to excellent use in his own and his master’s interest. Lord North, to whose ante-chamber he accordingly ran with his news, pronounced “the farther prosecution of the business a matter of the utmost importance.” And from that instant Joseph Hynson’s every act came under the surveillance of spies, agents assailed him with every artifice of corruption, his most careless note was scrutinized in its passage through the mails; and, finally, poor Isabella’s innocent, schoolgirl love letters seldom came inviolate to the eyes for which alone they were intended. “My Lord, I take the liberty of sending to you the enclosed Letter from Captain Hynson to his Mistress.... The writing on one side of the Letter is part of a rough draft of a Letter which his Mistress wrote to him,” says Vardill to North, February 10, 1777. Hynson’s letter is a mere impersonal account of his safe arrival in Dover, but Isabella’s “rough draft,” scrawled on the back of her lover’s page, seems yet warm with the pressure of the hand that wrote by the flicker of Mrs. Jump’s firelight: