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 "Mayhap—she was afraid o' what might happen an she did, John," answered Charity, in her timid way. "Hawtree affected not to know us—I think Jaffray really did not. Mayhap neither did, since it hath been three years or more they were here."

"Strange how war doth bring such villains to light," mused Squire Condit. "That man Jaffray was naught but a river pirate, masking his plunderings beneath the British flag. As for Hawtree, he is but a hanger-on o' the army—booted out, so I heard, from the service o' the enemy. The youth be a newcomer. I do not know him."

"I like it not, their return!" exclaimed Mistress Condit uneasily. "It bodes ill for us and all patriots!"

"Well, let us not worry, my dear," said the Squire reassuringly. And for a moment there was silence in the old kitchen.

The kitchen was the living room of the Condit family, as it was in most of the farmhouses scattered along the foot of the Newark Mountains at this time. There was carried on all the routine of ordinary life; its mud-plastered walls witnessed most of the comedies and many of the tragedies of which family existence was composed, then as now. A big room, it was dwarfed by the enormous fireplace in which Charity, for all her sixteen years, could still stand upright, as well as by the nearness