Hamilton turned pale.  “You are too young to have headaches,” he said.  “Perhaps you have been studying too hard.  I am so ambitious for my children; but the boys have taken to books as they have to kites and fisticuffs.  I should have remembered that girls—­” His memory gave up the stories of his mother’s precocity.  But this child, who was so startlingly like the dead woman, was far less fitted to carry such burdens.  So sensitive an intelligence in so frail a body might suddenly flame too high and fall to ashes.  He resolved to place her in classes of other little girls at once, and to keep her in the fields as much as possible.  None knew better than he how close the highly strung unresting brain could press to madness.  He had acquired a superhuman control over his.  If this girl’s brain had come out of his own, it must be closely watched.  She had not inherited his high light spirits, but the melancholy which had lain at the foundations of his mother’s nature; she would require the most persistent guarding.  He took her face between his hands and kissed it many times.

“Very well,” he said, “we will have our little secrets.  I will tell you when I am disturbed, and you will sit close beside me with your doll until I feel better.  But remember, I expect as much confidence in return.  You will never have a care nor a terror nor an annoyance that you will not confide it to me directly.”

She nodded.  “I’m always telling you things to myself.  And I won’t cry any more in the night, when I think you have felt badly and could not tell anyone.  It will all go away if you talk to me about it,” she added confidently.

Hamilton swung her to his shoulder again and started for the dining room.

“The child is uncanny,” he thought.  “Can there be anything in that old theory that tormented and erring souls come back to make their last expiation in children?  That means early death!” He dismissed the thought promptly.

XXXI

After dinner he called on Oliver Wolcott, the Comptroller, one of his closest friends, and related the scene of the morning, adding the explanation.  Wolcott was a Puritan, and did not approve of the marital digressions of his friends.  But in this case the offence was so much less than the accusation that he listened with frequent ejaculations of content.  He agreed at once to call at Hamilton’s house at eight o’clock, look over the papers, and read them aloud when the trio arrived.

“And may the devil damn them,” he added.  “It will be one of the keenest pleasures of my life to confound them.  The unpatriotic villains!  They know that in disgracing you they would discredit the United States, and in their hearts they know that your measures are the only wheels for this country to run on; but to their party spite they would sacrifice everything.  I’ll be there.”

And when the men called that night at nine o’clock, he read them the correspondence from beginning to end—­Reynold’s letters, and those of the woman.  More than once Muhlenberg begged him to desist, but he was merciless.  When he had finished, Hamilton explained that he had disguised his handwriting lest the man forge or make other use of it.