Elizabeth before answering turned her head in the direction in which the land, had it been in sight, would have appeared; but no vision of shore broke the wide circuit of ocean and sky.  Then her eyes came back to the little vessel as if to assure herself that she was not alone in this waste of water.  Her father sat on the opposite side reading.  With a word of reply to Nancy, she fell into silence again.  Only, instead of the vague wonder how she should meet the future, her thoughts now turned to the past.  It was nine mornings since that consultation with her father in the library, and they had been only one night at sea.  It had taken a week to get off.  From the first she had counted upon Mrs. Eveleigh’s remonstrances and vehement reproaches of Mr. Royal’s wrong-doing in taking his daughter into such danger.  They were only a little more vehement than she had expected.  But Mrs. Eveleigh did not know the errand; if she had, that would have made a difference, or, as Elizabeth reflected, she thought that this would have been treated as the strangest part of the affair.  But she had kept her own counsel, saying only that her father and she thought it right.  Mrs. Eveleigh had been so exasperated by being kept in the dark that she had retained her anger to the very last day.  Then she had drowned her resentment in a flood of tears, and declared between her sobs that, frightful as it all was, for she dreaded the very sight of a gun, she would rather go with Elizabeth than have the dear girl set off without any companion.  Elizabeth’s reminder that her father and Nancy were to accompany her only called forth the assertion that a maid was no companion, and a man was nothing at such a time.  Elizabeth thought that at the time of sieges and battles a man might be considered of some little consequence.  But she never argued with Mrs. Eveleigh, and she had quitted her thankful for the good lady’s affection, and glad that Mrs. Eveleigh was to be left behind on such an expedition.

“You’ll never come back,” Mrs. Eveleigh sobbed.  “The French ships of war will be sure to gobble up you and your father, too.  I know just how it will be.  You are a crazy girl, and I don’t know what is the matter with you,” she had added irrelevantly; “and as to your father, you must have bewitched him; he used to have plenty of common sense.”

The matter with Mr. Royal was, that he knew his daughter well enough to be sure that if Archdale was killed during the siege she would feel always that her silence might have given the opportunity for his death.  And he knew that to bring upon Elizabeth the miseries of an uneasy conscience would be to kill her by slow torture.  Besides, he himself believed in the danger, his own conscience was aroused, and that was not easily put to sleep.  But if he had heard the verdict of Mrs. Eveleigh, who knew nothing of the matter, he would not have blamed her so much.