“Grace!  Grace!” called Miss Rosalie, and before Sylvia could respond her loyal playmate had turned obediently back to the house.

Sylvia stepped out on the street, her eyes a little blurred by tears, but greatly comforted by Grace’s assuring words of friendship.

She did not want to go home and tell her mother what had happened, and show her Miss Patten’s note, for she knew that her mother would be troubled and unhappy.

Suddenly she decided to go to her father’s warehouse and tell him, and go home with him at noon.  She was sure her father would think she had done right.

She turned and walked quickly down King Street, and in a short time she was near the wharves and could see the long building where her father stored the cotton he purchased from the planters.  The wharves were piled high with boxes and bales, and there were small boats coming in to the wharves, and others making ready to depart.

Sylvia could see her father’s boat close to the wharf near the warehouse.  “I wish I could take that boat and carry Estralla off to Fort Sumter,” she thought.

A good-natured negro led her to Mr. Fulton’s office, and before her father could say a word Sylvia was in the midst of her story.  She told of the blue cockades that the other girls wore, of the palmetto flag, and of her failure to salute it, and handed him Miss Patten’s note.

Mr. Fulton looked serious and troubled as he listened to his little girl’s story.  Then he lifted her to his knee, took off her pretty hat, and said: 

“Too bad, dear child!  But you did right.  A little Yankee girl must be loyal to the Stars and Stripes.  I am glad you came and told me.”

For a moment it seemed to Sylvia that her father had forgotten all about her.  He was looking straight out of the window.

While he had not forgotten his little girl he was thinking that Charleston people must be quite ready to take the serious step of urging their State to declare her secession from the United States, and her right to buy and sell human beings as slaves.

He wished that the United States officers at Fort Moultrie could realize that at any time Charleston men might seize Fort Sumter, where there were but few soldiers, and he said aloud:  “I ought to warn them.”

Sylvia wondered for a moment what her father could mean, but he said quickly:  “Jump down and put on your hat.  I’m going to sail down to Fort Moultrie and have a talk with my good friends there, and you can come with me.”

At this good news Sylvia forgot all her troubles.  A sail across the harbor with her father was the most delightful thing that she could imagine.  And she held fast to his hand, smiling happily, as they walked down the wharf where the boat was fastened.

Mr. Fulton was beginning to find his position as a northern man in Charleston rather uncomfortable.  Many of his southern friends firmly believed that the northern men had no right to tell them that slavery was wrong and must cease.  He wished to protect his business interests, or he would have returned to Boston; for it was difficult for him not to declare his own patriotic feeling that Abraham Lincoln, who had just been elected President of the United States, would never permit slavery to continue.