“I suppose that we shall return this evening,” she said after the greetings and inquiries were over and Mr. Royal had explained that in a few minutes all that he had come for could be said to Mr. Archdale.  Although after thinking the matter over carefully he had decided that it was Elizabeth, filled with the spirit of her warning, who should herself give her message to Archdale yet he spoke to Pepperell as if she had accompanied him.  And when the General said that he had already sent for the young man, Mr. Royal told him that his daughter had that in her pocket for him which, if he knew, it would lend wings to his feet.

“A letter from our charming Mistress Katie,” pronounced Pepperell, smiling at Elizabeth.

“Yes,” she said, and after a little repeated her question of their returning that evening.

“Yes, I know,” said the General.  He waited a moment, and then added.  “But if you come among soldiers, you will feel the exactions of war.  There are those dispatches, you remember, not even read yet” and he touched the breast of his coat, “because I was in such haste to pay my respects to you.  Now, I should like to send an answer to these, and I am afraid I shall not have it ready before to-morrow morning; the Commodore will probably write me to-night and I want to include whatever news he may have.  Will to-morrow do?”

“Oh, yes, I shall be glad to help the cause, even so little as that,” she answered.  Pepperell thanked her for her words, and ignored the look of disappointment that he had seen flit across her face before she spoke.

“We have been putting up a fascine battery within two hundred and fifteen yards of the west gate,” he said, “It will open fire in an hour, and then you will see a cannonade!  We have two forty-two pounders there, it will be no child’s play.”  Nothing had then hinted at the Titanic scale of modern war engines.  Elizabeth’s eyes dilated, but she said nothing.  The General sat beside her, and asked how things were going on in Boston, asked about his friends, and many trifling details that neither dispatches nor letters would give him, and that she wondered that he had heart for in the scenes going on about him.  Then he told them many particulars of the siege and especially of the terrible labor of dragging the heavy guns from the shore into position, interspersing all this narrative of the life-and-death struggles with amusing anecdotes and bright comments, until she was amazed, and in listening found that she had gained a better knowledge of him than in years of ordinary acquaintance.  For she could not have realized by that how many-sided the man was, how full of resources, and how indomitable.  She noticed how sympathetically he spoke of the brave fellows he was leading.  When he said that the hardships of the campaign and the cold of a severer climate than they had been accustomed to had prostrated numbers of them.  Elizabeth saw that it was not only soldiers that he felt he was losing when they died, but men from his own home and neighborhood and in whom he had a personal interest.  Then as he sat there, she begged him not to think of her if others needed him but to go.