“About who?” asked Sally Rose. “The logger? Tom Trask was his name, he said. I don’t know anything about Tom Trask, except that I caught him kissing you. I wonder why you didn’t stop him. If Granny finds out--” “I didn’t have time to stop him,” retorted Kitty severely. “And don’t try to change the subject. The ‘him’ I want to know about is that British officer. Captain Malory of the Twenty-third.” “Oh!” exclaimed Sally Rose uneasily. She, too, left the bed, and went to stand between the patchwork curtains at the window. It was nearly midnight. Late moonrise silvered the sky over Plum Island, and the young leaves stirred restlessly in the sea wind, hiding the quiet darkness of Granny’s crocus and daffodil beds in the garden below. “You know you really want to tell me about him,” continued Kitty. “You always want to tell me about the lads you’ve taken a fancy to.” Sally Rose did not turn, and when she answered, her voice was very quiet, with none of the usual merry undertones that made it so charming. “Oh, but this is different, Kitty. You guessed right--he is twenty. And Father says he’s an enemy.” She laughed ruefully. “In fact, Father says he’s a damned lobsterback, and I mustn’t see him again. But I sent him a note to tell him where I was going, and maybe.... But how did you know he was British? You only heard me say his name.” Kitty could feel her face burn in the darkness. She still felt ashamed, though it hadn’t been her fault, really. “I read it in a letter,” she said with some stiffness, “the letter your father wrote to Granny, telling her why he was sending you here. I went down to meet the postrider, and when he handed me a letter addressed to C. Greenleaf, I never thought that it was for Granny instead of me, and so I read it. Of course she’s Catherine, too.” “What did Father say?” asked Sally Rose. Her voice had a worried sound. “It began, ‘My dear,’ instead of ‘Dear Mother’--that’s why I didn’t know it was for Gran, and I kept on reading. He said ‘I’m worried about our little girl.’” Kitty paused, and Sally Rose did not question her any further just then. Both girls looked through the window, over the roofs of the town, at the wide dark waters of the Merrimack flowing seaward. Fifteen years ago, about this time of the year, Caleb Greenleaf had taken his wife, Becky, and his married sister, Anne Townsend, for a little jaunt on the river in the April sunshine. The young mothers had left their baby girls with Granny Greenleaf, and gone happily aboard his small fishing boat, and no one had foreseen the sudden mad wind, the squall of snow that would engulf them. Afterwards, Granny had brought up orphan Kitty, but Job Townsend had taken his motherless daughter back to Charlestown to his own people. The tragedy had brought him close to his mother-in-law, however, so that he still addressed her as ‘My dear,’ and spoke of ‘our little girl,’ and there had been much going back and forth between them.