Page:Mistress Madcap Surrenders (1926).pdf/24

 lence; but so absorbed were they in that vast subject which concerned everyone—the war—for this was the exciting, perilous time of the American Revolution—that they did not notice the bitter wind or the sting of the sleety snow. The Revolution had dragged on for four long years. Long since had the Minute Men repelled the British at Lexington and Concord, long since had Washington crossed the Delaware at Trenton. The American army had passed the first winter at Morris Town and that dreary winter at Valley Forge. Soldiers and civilians alike were beginning the terrific winter of 1779–80 with grim dread and grimmer fortitude, lonely hearths with gaps in the family circles once occupied by fathers and sons were becoming more common, now, and the two girls were speaking mournfully of their brother, John Condit, who was a surgeon under Washington, and whom they had not seen for months, when all at once Mehitable exclaimed in a startled tone. They had descended abruptly from the lane into a meadow already white with snow!

"Why, Cherry, I vow 'tis a blizzard which hath swept o'er the Orange Mountain upon us!" She tried to peer through the baffling curtain of snowflakes. "We be off the lane and in someone's field, but whose, I know not! And which way lies the lane, I know not, either!"

"Oh, Hitty!" Charity, frail and timid, tried to