“I tell thee, friend,” a stout grey-coated stranger was saying, “England forgets that for long years she has sent the freedom-lovers to America to be rid of them and has granted them many liberties as a bribe to them to stay there. Now, in the third and fourth generation, the Mother Country seeks to take back these privileges and to make us law-ridden and yoke-bound like her own Englishmen, who have stopped at home. It is a mistake that will cost the King dear.”
“Yea,” ejaculated a man beside him whose black clothes indicated that he was a minister. “They sowed the wind, they will reap the whirlwind!” The black-clad gentleman, it seemed, was on the point of delivering a long sermon upon this text had not Master Sheffield, taking up the papers that Clotilde gave him, rather adroitly cut the dissertation short, at which the stout Quaker chuckled behind his hand.
Later in the morning Clotilde stood by Stephen in the porch watching the broad back and wide grey hat of the stout visitor as he and his plump, ambling white horse disappeared down the avenue.
“Look well at that man, Clotilde,” said Stephen, “he is a Quaker and would, in Master Simon’s time have been whipped and stoned out of Massachusetts. Now we are proud that we have speech with him and that he has come all the long way from Pennsylvania to consult with us. We Puritans have learned a little, a very little, in a hundred years.”
Clotilde sighed heavily and turned to go in. It seemed to her that she cared little to hear of such progress when all the time her dear Master Sheffield was growing thinner and whiter and that terrible war was coming ever nearer. She felt as she often did when the clouds of a summer thunderstorm were hanging lower and lower above the house, when the light was of a weird unearthly brightness and the air so terrifyingly still that, frightened as she was, she almost prayed for the storm to break.
The Spring passed and the summer, while the rumblings and threatenings of war still sounded loud. Then, through the autumn and winter there was a lull, people began to look more cheerful, to talk of the possibility of a peaceful settlement, of England’s understanding that the struggle with the Colonies would be too long and bitter to be worth while. For the work that Stephen had done toward bringing the provinces together, those steady years of hopeful toil, had begun to bear fruit at last. Committees of Correspondence had been formed, the Continental Congress had met and the organisation of the Massachusetts minute-men had been copied by similar bands all up and down the sea-board. The friends of America in England, were pointing out to the headlong King George the Third that he was facing a nation with an army, instead of a handful of helpless rebels. So, for the winter at least, the King paused. And then came Spring again.