The smile on his thin lips grew a little broader, a little less pleasant.

He understood the reason of that hostility, which had been daily growing in this past week since Monmouth had come to turn the brains of women of all ages.

The Misses Pitt, he apprehended, contemned him that he, a young and vigorous man, of a military training which might now be valuable to the Cause, should stand aloof; that he should placidly smoke his pipe and tend his geraniums on this evening of all evenings, when men of spirit were rallying to the Protestant Champion, offering their blood to place him on the throne where he belonged.
If Mr.Blood had condescended to debate the matter with these ladies, he might have urged that having had his fill of wandering and adventuring, he was now embarked upon the career for which he had been originally intended and for which his studies had equipped him; that he was a man of medicine and not of war; a healer, not a slayer.

But they would have answered him, he knew, that in such a cause it behoved every man who deemed himself a man to take up arms.

They would have pointed out that their own nephew Jeremiah, who was by trade a sailor, the master of a ship--which by an ill-chance for that young man had come to anchor at this season in Bridgewater Bay--had quitted the helm to snatch up a musket in defence of Right.