The absence of Mobray and Andre brought the commissary once again to the fore.  Previous to their departure he had dropped in upon the Merediths, only to receive a cool greeting from Janice, and such cold ones from the two captains as discouraged repetition.  Now, relieved of their supercilious taunts and affronts, the baron became a daily visitor.  He always brought gifts of delicacies, paid open court to Mrs. Meredith, and never once recurred to the words he had wrung from Janice, for the time making himself both useful and entertaining.  From his calls the ladies learned the course of the war and of what the distant cannonading meant:  of the bloody repulse of Donop’s Hessians at Red Bank, of the burning of the Augusta 64, of the bombardment of the forts on Mud Island, and of the other desperate fighting by which the British struggled to free their jugular vein, the river, from the clutch of Washington’s forces.

It was Clowes who brought them the best proof of the final triumph of the royal army, for one November morning he broke in upon their breakfast, unannounced, and with him came Mr. Meredith.

Had the squire ever doubted the affection of his wife and daughter, the next few minutes of inarticulate but ecstatic delight would have convinced him once for all.  Mrs. Meredith, who, since her fever, had been unwontedly gentle and affectionate, welcomed him as he had not been greeted in years; and Janice, shifting from tears to laughter and back again, wellnigh choked him in her delight.  Breakfast was forgotten, while the exile was made to tell all his adventures, and of how finally he had escaped from the ship on which perforce he had been for three months.

“’T was desperate fighting on both sides, but we were too many for them, and the river is free at last.  The transport ‘Surrey’ was third to come up to the city, and the moment I was ashore I sought out Lord Clowes, hoping to get word of ye, and was not disappointed.  Pox me! but I’d begun to think that never again should I see ye!”

There was so much to tell and to listen to in the next few days that the reunited family gave little heed to public events, though warm salutations and thanks were lavished on Mobray and Andre upon the return of the regiments which had operated against the forts.

An enforced change speedily brought them back to the present.  The mustering of all the royal army, now swelled by reinforcements of three thousand troops hurriedly summoned from New York, compelled a rebilleting of the troops, and nine more officers were assigned by the quartermaster-general to the Franklin house, overcrowding it to such an extent as to end the possibility that it should longer shelter the Merediths.  The squire went to Sir William Erskine, only to be told that as he was a civilian, the Quartermaster’s Department could, or at least would, do nothing for him.  An appeal to Clowes resulted better, for that officer offered to share his own lodgings with his friends,—­a generosity which delighted Mr. Meredith, but which put an anxious look on his daughter’s face and a scowl on that of Mobray.