“You? Why you are but a child!” exclaimed the Doctor. “Only last week, it seems to me, I saw you, a little maid, standing in that doorway with your white-frilled apron and your braided hair and with a smoking blunderbuss held in your hand as daintily as though it were a rose.”
“That was more like seven years ago than seven days,” she answered, “and I am surely now a woman grown although I have failed somehow to reach a woman’s stature. I have wished often,” she added with a sigh, for this was a sore subject with her, “that I could have grown tall and stately like all of those of Master Simon’s kindred.”
“Whatever her age and size, she has done a woman’s work since the war began,” said Stephen. “And as for your height, my child, sigh not over that as being unlike the others. Radpaths, Bardwells and Sheffields, we are all proud to call you one of us!”
At which speech, Clotilde first dropped him a stately curtsey and then ran across the room to throw her arms about his neck.
It was a long, long time, as the Doctor had feared, before the young English officer made even enough progress on the road toward health to warrant them in hoping that he could be brought the whole of that toilsome way. Many weeks it was before his fevered mind became wholly clear, or the Doctor would permit his being questioned as to who he was and whether there was really reason for his resemblance to the portrait in the dining room. Upon the first day that he sat up, however, he put all doubts to an end by giving a full account of himself. Not only did he prove to be of Stephen’s kindred and the grandson of Amos Bardwell, but his surname was the same as Master Simon’s. His mother had married a distant kinsman of Master Simon’s and the boy’s name, therefore, was Radpath, Gerald Radpath.
“And I am as proud of my Puritan ancestor as any of you Americans can be,” he said to Stephen and Clotilde as they sat beside his bed. “I have heard from my mother all the tales of that far journey among the Indians and how his daughter and my own grandfather, Amos Bardwell, dared to stand firm at the witch trial. But my knowledge of scenes and places was vague, having come through so many hands and I never dreamed, that night when I found Mademoiselle Clotilde that the place of our meeting was the shoemaker’s cottage and that the snow-covered scene of my disaster was Master Simon’s famous garden.”