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 "Until when?" asked Mistress Condit, trying hard not to smile as John's voice died away in moping silence. She was truly sympathetic; but the lover's quarrel appeared so trivial beside that great one between mother country and the young colonies.

John laughed shortly. "Until she wasn't kind," he responded in a grim voice. Then his gaze softened as he looked down into Charity's face. His little sister had come to stand close to him, fondling his hand as it hung by his side.

"But Mistress Nancy told me a most marvelous fairy tale!" observed she triumphantly.

"What fairy tale, little lass?" asked her brother idly.

But just at that instant Sturgins passed them, his sightless eyes turned upon them, and John's attention was distracted, so that the fairy tale, which might have enlightened him considerably as to a certain matter, did not receive a repetition in its telling.

"Why, Mother," John Condit spoke in surprise, "who is yonder fellow? I have not seen him around here before!"

"You mean Sturgins?" responded Mistress Condit inquiringly. "He is the man whom Young Cy made blind, by a blow, your father thinks, as he struggled to escape from him and from the villain Jaffray by the Passaic."

She launched into a description of the encounter as her husband had told it to her, the young doctor not removing his gaze from the blind man's pathetic, groping hands and white face.