PETERSON’S MAGAZINE.
THE INTERVIEW.
BY JAMES H. SANA.
CHAPTER I.
The sun had just set, and the grey twilight was beginning to steal over the landscape, when the iron gateway of a spacious garden, attached to one of thoso old manorial-like residences which existed, here and there, in our ante-revolutionary times, was cautiously pushed open.
"Courage, Amy," said a sweet voice, that itself vainly essayed to be heroic. "Courage, you are in the path of duty, then why should you tremble?"
But the companion of the fair speaker, who .was even more beautiful than her lovely confi dant, hesitated and drew back.
"Oh! what will uncle say?" was her reply. "I have never disobeyed him before, and he has always been like a father to me."
"What will Leonard say if you don't meet him? He is going to join the army to-morrow; he is about to risk his life in the noblest of causes; and will you refuse to say farewell to him?"
As she spoke, she dragged her companion through the gateway, and, at the same instant, a gentleman, attired in plain citizen's clothes, and carrying a cloak on his arm to be used if necessary as a disguise, emerged from the shadow of the wall.
"There, I'll keep watch here," said the first speaker, pushing her timid, blushing, trembling friend toward the eager cavalier, "and don't, at such a moment, be ashamed to tell Capt. Leonard how much you love him."
Amy Florence was the niece and heiress of Judgo Shannon, who, after having been successively attorney general and justice of the Su preme Court, had retired, a few years before the war of Independence began, to his splendid country-scat, in the vicinity of Philadelphia. Like many of the wealthy officials of that day he leaned strongly to the royal side, and hence had banished his niece's favorite suitor from the house, though, before the quarrel had becomo so heated, nobody had been a more weleome guest there than Hugh Leonard, the orphan son of Judge Shannon's early friend and patron, and himself a brilliant and rising young lawyer. "The young traitor," he exclaimed, angrily, when he announced this to Amy, "I might have forgiven him, if he had stood neuter, though it were shame in one, whose ancestors had fought at Naseby for the king, to be even that; but to write on the side of these rebels, to accept a commission in their beggarly army, I'll never forgive him as long as old John Shannon lives! You'll live to see him hung," he continued, in different to Amy's tears, for the judge was one of those who had little care for the feelings of others, when he was angry. "Many a better man, and less of a traitor, suffered in the fortyfive." Thus forbidden to visit his mistress, Leonard, or Capt. Leonard, as we ought to call him, had solicited a parting interview with Amy, beforo he joined the army, a request which she had long delayed to grant, for, brought up as she had been, it seemed both unmaidenly in itself and ungrateful townrd her uncle. Not that she did not love Leonard. No pledges, indeed, had ever been exchanged between them; but they had been so much together, and their tastes were so similar, that she could not help but love him; though, so little did high-bred maidens think of such things in her time, that she was ignorant of the state of her heart till her uncle banished Leonard, which first revealed to her how her happiness depended on the exile. But in spite of all this, her lofty notions of duty might have prevented her granting the interview, so longand eagerly solicited, if it had not been for herfriend, Kate Manners, who plead the lover's cause17
