“A captain,” she corrected him. “A captain in the Twenty-third.” “Ah yes, a captain. I can hear the watch coming down the street, and we cannot leave here until he is gone. Sit down on the grass.” Indeed it was the watch, and she could hear him shouting as he turned the corner by the brick well. “Ten o’ the clock, this thirteenth night o’ June, and the weather fair. Town’s empty, Sons o’ Liberty gone to camp, Rogues and Tories to Boston!” The young Englishman drew her down in the shadow of a flowering quince tree. She sat there straight and proper and he sprawled with careless grace beside her, not alarmingly near. “No, I never meant to bear arms, and how I came to do it is no matter, but I, too, wish England and America could settle their differences without spilling blood. Do you think I am a coward, Kitty?” “No,” she said slowly. “I do not think that.” The voice of the watch grew louder. He must be passing very close by. “I have cursed the Americans, and yet I am not sure I was right when I did it. I have gone amongst them some, even been kept in gaol by them, and yet I can’t see that they’re any worse fellows than I. I cannot help thinking that I myself might have been an American. Except for a choice a man made some hundred and fifty years ago. The right choice, of course--and yet--” Kitty felt her blood stir in a different way now. She had been thrilling to his strangeness and his handsomeness, and the excitement of this secret meeting. But now she had the uncanny feel that there were ghosts about. Mighty ghosts, ghosts of countries coming together, here in the dim starlight in the shadow of Bunker Hill. “You an American? How?” He settled comfortably in the grass. “Listen, Kitty, I’ll tell you more of myself than I ever told Sally Rose. I do not know why, unless it is because you are less distractingly fair. Alas, I am afraid I like overwell to talk, Kitty.” “So does everyone, it seems,” murmured Kitty. “But what happened--a hundred and fifty years ago?” “I like to talk, I suppose, because my mother was a strolling player, and famous for the way she spoke her lines as well as her good looks. She traveled the fairs and market towns, and everywhere she was made welcome and a stage set up for her. My father was a West Country farmer, and a dull husband I think he made her. I cannot recall her too well. But it was through his blood that I might have been born an American.” The voice of the watch was fading now, down by the tannery and the distilleries, but Gerry Malory kept on talking. “My father would shake his head, I remember, whenever anyone mentioned America. ’Twas a legend in our family that once an old grandsire of ours, about the time I mention, had journeyed to Plymouth and watched a shipful of people leaving that country to settle in this one. That he thought for a time to go with them, but decided against it. Sometimes I wonder if he had gone--”