“And what said your wife and daughter to such a move?”

“Oh, the wife is a good wife, and follows her husband; though I won’t say she did not feel the wrench of parting a good bit.  As for the maid, she was wild to come!  She has done nothing but think of the war ever since it began.  She is half a soldier already, I tell her, and is making herself only fit to be a soldier’s wife.  She might have had the pick of all the young Quakers in Philadelphia; but you should have seen her turn up her pretty nose at them. “’A Quaker indeed!’ quoth the little puss; ’I’d as lief marry a broomstick with a turnip for a head!  Give me a man who is a man, not a puling woman in breeches!’

“The sauciness of the little puss!”

But Ashley’s jolly laugh showed that he encouraged the maid in her “sauciness,” and Fritz and Humphrey laughed in sympathy.

“Where are Mrs. Ashley and Susanna to be found?” asked Fritz when the laugh had subsided.

K “Oh, somewhere in the house, poking and prying, and settling the things in woman’s fashion.  Anything in the house is to be ours, and we may buy cheap a quantity of the furniture which is being taken out of the houses which are too much shattered to be rebuilt.  We have brought things of our own, too.  Oh, we shall do well, we shall do well.  It was a capital thought to come here.  Canada in English hands will have a great future before it.”

But Fritz was off already, leaving Humphrey to discuss the situation with his brother-in-law.  He was off in search of Susanna, and presently came upon her sitting upon a wide window ledge which commanded a view of the quay and harbour, and of the heights of Point Levi opposite.  Hannah was taking housewifely notes on the upper floor; but the view from this window had fascinated the girl, and she sat gazing out, lost in thought, a thousand pictures flitting through her imaginative brain.

“Susanna!” spoke a voice behind her.

She started to her feet, quivering in every limb; and facing round, found herself confronted by him whose face and form had been the centre of each of her mental pictures, whose name had been on her lips and in her heart each time she had bent her knees in prayer for two long years, and who she knew had come at last to ask the fulfilment of that promise she had given him when last they had parted.

Her hands were in his; his face was bent over hers.  He disengaged one hand, and put it round her shoulders, drawing her towards him gently.

She did not resist; she gave a happy little sigh, and stood with her fair head close to his shoulder.

“Susanna, I have done what I hoped.  I am a captain in the English King’s army.  I have won some small reputation as a soldier.  I have a position sufficiently assured.  You have come to live at Quebec.  I am quartered there for the winter.  Many of our officers and soldiers have wives who follow them wherever they go.  I would not ask you to come to me to share hardship and privation; but I ask you to be my wife, here in this city, where your father’s house will give you shelter if I should be forced by the chances of war to leave you for a while.