She took this from him with a clear competence that yet didn't belittle his own--though his own, it might be added, was to indulge, the very next thing, in a throb of finer complacency. She stared a moment before saying, as she did with much point, that she hadn't heard of any American who when their capital fell before the British arms had given _them_ any credit for anything; on which remark he commented in turn, smiling at what she appeared to have meant. "Don't you happen to have heard, my dear, of the great revolutionary struggle with your poor mad old king, now at his last gasp as they tell me, through which my country won the independence it enjoys?" He thought he had never in life seen anything handsomer than the way Miss Midmore had of tossing her head with a spirit and an air that might have been partly a fruit of breeding and partly an extravagance of humour. It made him note even at the moment that he had really in New York never seen a head prescriptively tossed, or never at least with that high grace; in spite of its being withal supposed there that the young American ladies were unsurpassed in their frank pretension to consequence. "We haven't forgotten how dreadfully ill you all behaved long ago," were the words with which she met this reflection on her intelligence; "but it's lucky for you that you had made overtures--to ourselves here I mean--before we came to blows with you again a few years since." "I see, I see--friendly assurances had passed; so friendly that when the public breach was healed there was very little of the private left to be patched up with it." He rendered this justice to her not having gone so astray. "But I think the great thing must have been that I myself, such as you see me, don't remember the time when I didn't fairly languish for the sight of you. I mean," he explained, "for a view of London and of the dear old country--which my grandparents, you understand, when here in 1806 and lay it on as they would, I know, couldn't write home to us flattering enough accounts of." "It was in 1807, if you please," Molly Midmore said, "and it was that visit of theirs, in which they showed such a desire to be civil, that began the great difference of which you and I enjoy at last the full advantage. They must have done very well," she next declared, "seeing the small cause we had to make much of you. They showed how they wished to change that and did their utmost for it. It was afterwards remembered among us that they had taken great pains."