"Mr. Franklin will ever be as young at heart as he is old in years," said the lady presently, with the old charm of her manner, and all wistfulness and worry quite gone from her face. She had been strengthened by Mary's love in the failing citadel of her heart. "'Tis Mr. Franklin's most noble gift that he can keep in sympathy with the thoughts and purposes of younger men. Age is wont to be narrow and to depend upon certainties of the past, while youth has its easily gathered hopes and quick intuitions. Mr. Franklin is both characters at once,--as sanguine as he is experienced. I knew him well; he will be the same man now, and as easy a courtier as he was then content with his thrift and prudence. I trust him among the first of those who can mend our present troubles.
"I beg you not to think that I am unmindful of our wrongs in the colonies, Mary, my dear," she added then, in a changed voice. "'T is but your foolish way of trying to mend them that has grieved me,--you who call yourselves the Patriots!"
Mary smiled again and kept silence, but with something of a doubtful heart. She did not wish to argue about politics, that sunny day on the sea. No good could come of it, though she had a keen sense that her companion's mind was now sometimes unsettled from its old prejudices and firm beliefs. The captain was a stanch Royalist, who believed that the rebels were sure to be put down, and that no sensible man should find himself left in the foolish situation of a King's antagonist, or suffer the futility of such defeat.
"Will Mistress Davis look like her mother, do you think?" Mary again bethought herself to return to the simpler subject of their conversation.
"Yes, no doubt; they had the same brave eyes and yet strangely timid look. 'T is a delicate, frail, spirited face. Our cousin Davis would be white-headed now; she was already gray in her twenties, when I last saw her. It sometimes seems but the other day. They said that Mistress Goodwin came home from Canada with her hair as white as snow. Yes, their eyes were alike; but the daughter had a Goodwin look, small featured and neatly made, as their women are. She could hold to a purpose and was very capable, and had wonderful quickness with figures; 't is common to the whole line. Mistress Hetty, the mother, had a pleasing gentleness, but great dignity; she was born of those who long had been used to responsibility and the direction of others."