“Oh, never!” cried the girl.

“Ay.  Am I not right, Mobray?”

“Beyond question.  And then ’t is not worth the portrait it encircles,” asserted Mobray, gallantly.

“And yet I could not get one pound for it,” marvelled Janice, and told the two officers how she had sought to barter it.

“’T is evident you asked too little, Miss Meredith,” surmised Andre, “and so made him suspect your title.”

“Would that you might offer it to me at a hundred times five pounds!” bemoaned the baronet.  “To think of such a pearl being cast before such swine

“Who painted it, Miss Meredith?” asked Andre.

“’T was Colonel Brereton.”

Mobray looked up quickly at her, then once more at the miniature.  He turned it over, and as the initials on the back caught his eye, he frowned, but more with intentness than anger.  For a moment he held it, then handed it to Janice with the remark, “Know you the frame’s history?”

“Only that it once held another portrait, and that of a most beautiful girl.”

“Whom he forgot, it appears, once you were seen, for which small blame to him, Miss Meredith,” replied Mobray, as he rose and left the room, his face set sternly, as if he were fighting some emotion.

For two days the young officers continued to get infinite amusement out of the rebel news, but on the third their gibes and flouts ceased, and a sudden gravity ensued, the cause of which was explained to the women that evening when the time had come for “good-night.”

“Ladies,” said Andre, “the route is ordered before daybreak to-morrow, so we must say a farewell to you now, and leave you for a time to the sole charge of Mrs. O’Flaherty.  She has orders from us, and from her putative spouse, to take the greatest care of you both, and we have endeavoured to arrange that you shall want for nothing during what we fervently hope will be but a brief absence.”

“For what are you leaving us?” asked Mrs. Meredith.

“In truth, ’t is a sorry business,” growled Mobray.  “Confirmation came last night of Burgoyne’s capitulation, and this means that General Gates’s army will at once effect a juncture with Washington’s, and the combined force will give us more than we bargained to fight.  Burgoyne’s fiasco makes it all the more necessary that we hold Philadelphia, and so, as our one chance, we must, ere the union is effected, capture the forts on the Delaware, that our warships and supplies may come to us, lest, when the moment arrives for our desperate struggle, we be handicapped by short commons and no line of retreat.”

“Wilt pray for our success, Miss Meredith?”

“Ay,” urged the baronet, “for whatever your sympathies, remember that we fight this time to reunite you with your father.”

And that night Janice made her first plea in behalf of the British arms.