e
going abroad."

She looked up at him quickly.

"Years ago I knew a boy--with your easy humour and your trick of speech.
He resembled you otherwise; and he wore your name becomingly."

He tried to recall knowing her in his extreme youth, but made no definite
connection.

"You wouldn't remember," she said gravely; "but I think I know you now.
Who is your father?"

"My father?" he repeated, surprised and smiling. "My father is John Brown
3rd."

"And his father?"

"My grandfather?" he asked, very much amused. "Oh, he was John Brown 2nd.
And _his_ father was Captain John Brown of Westchester; but I don't want
to talk D. A. R. talk to you about my great grandfather----"

"He fought at Pound Ridge," said the girl, slowly.

"Yes," said Brown, astonished.

"Tarleton's cavalry--the brutal hussars of the legion--killed him on the
Stamford Road," she said; "and he lay there in the field all day with one
dead arm over his face and his broken pistol in his hand, and the
terrible galloping fight drove past down the stony New Canaan road--and
the smoke from the meeting house afire rolled blacker and blacker and
redder and redder----"

With a quickly drawn breath she covered her face with both hands and
stood a moment silent; and Brown stared at her, astonished, doubting his
eyes and ears.

The next moment she dropped her hands and looked at him with a tremulous
smile.

"What in the world can you be thinking of me?" she said. "Alone in this
old house, here among the remoter hills of Westchester. I live so vividly
in the past that these almost forgotten tragedies seem very real to me
and touch me closely. To me the present is only a shadow; the past is
life itself. Can you understand?"

"I see," he said, intensely relieved concerning her mental stability;
"you are a Daughter of the American Revolution or a Society of Colonial
Wars or--er--something equally--er--interesting and desirable----"

"I am a Daughter of the American Revolution," she said proudly.

"Exactly," he smiled with an inward shudder. "A--a very
interesting--er--and--exceedingly--and--all that sort of thing," he
nodded amiably. "Don't take much interest in it myself--being a broker
and rather busy----"

"I am sorry."

He looked up quickly and met her strange eyes, one hazel-grey, one
hazel-brown.

"I--I'll be delighted to take an interest in anything you--in--er--this
Revolutionary business if you--if you don't mind telling me about it," he
s