had been foully
insinuated against him by a man of whose subtle wickedness she was
persuaded, and whom, of all others, she most heartily execrated. She
was, therefore, led indignantly, though temperately, to repel the
slander by which her father's hatred had been artfully envenomed. But
when, in the fierce fervor of his displeasure, Lindsay had announced to
her the danger that had befallen Butler, the disclosure opened to her
mind a world of misery. The late silence of her lover had already
alarmed her fears, and this announcement suggested the worst of the many
anxious conjectures which her brooding spirit had imagined as the cause
of that absence of tidings. Her emotions upon this disclosure were those
of a bursting heart that dared not trust itself with words; and when her
father, seeing the unlooked-for mischief he had done, sought to temper
his speech, and retract some of the harshness of his communication, by
an explanation, the only effect was, for the moment, to take off the
edge of her keenest grief. But when she left his presence, and recovered
herself sufficiently to recall all that had passed, the dreadful thought
of disaster to Butler, came back upon her imagination with all the
horrors which a fond heart could summon around it. A weary hour was
spent in sobs and tears; and it was only by the blandishments of her
brother Henry's kind and earnest sympathy, when the youth found her in
the parlor thus whelmed in sorrow, and by his manly and cheering
reckoning of the many chances of safety that attend the footsteps of a
prudent and a brave man, that she began to regain that resolute
equanimity that was a natural and even predominating attribute of her
character.

When Lindsay came into the parlor with the tidings of the victory at
Camden, such was the state in which he found her; and whilst he
announced to her that event which had given him so much joy, he was not
unheedful of the pang he had previously inflicted, and now endeavored to
make amends by throwing in some apparently casual, though intentional,
reference to the condition of Butler, who, he doubted not, would now be
disposed of on easy terms. "Perhaps," he continued, "as the war was
drawing to a close, and the royal clemency had been singularly
considerate of the mistaken men who had taken arms against their king,
he would in a little while be discharged on his parole." This reluctant
and forced crumb of comfort fell before one who had but little appe