"There's Col. Vaughan," said Nancy. "See! he's there beside the General, and he looks as cross as can be."
"Then you may be sure the engagement is put off," returned Elizabeth.
"I shall not leave yet. I will go back to shore," said her father, glad to return to a place which only consideration for his daughter's safety had induced him to leave at that time.
They had just stepped upon the beach again when the General came up, accompanied by Commodore Warren.
"They're going to surrender," said Pepperell to Elizabeth, as the two commanders bowed, and passed on hastily.
So Elizabeth did not go to Canso, where the hospitals had been removed. In the light of after events she felt sometimes that it might have been better if she had gone.
Two days later Pepperell marched into Louisburg, at the head of his troops. The French, who were to depart with the honors of war and to sail for France, were drawn up, as if on parade, to receive the victorious army. The colonial volunteers looked at the battered defences, which were still strong enough to have resisted them longer if a combined attack had not been threatened, and they said to one another:--
"It takes our General to capture a Gibraltar. We should all have been in our graves if we had obeyed Governor Shirley, and begun by assault."
From the window of a house overlooking the square, Elizabeth and her faithful attendant watched the whole ceremony of giving and taking formal possession of the city, the exchange of salutations between the French troops and their conquerors, and the departure of the former, with drums beating and colors flying, to embark for France under a twelve months' parole. When all was over, and she still sat there, her eyes full of proud tears at the glory of her country, a voice behind her said:--
She turned, surprised, her lashes still wet.
"I didn't hear you coming," she answered. "You mean when I said I should like to be invited to walk through Louisburg?"
"I should be glad, by and by, if you have leisure; although I suppose that everybody will have that now."
He smiled. "If you saw Pepperell's tasks, you wouldn't think so."
"Then, I suppose that you are busy, too, and everybody else?"
The words seemed to sound over and over again in Elizabeth's ears,--words, in themselves, almost ungracious, but which his tone had made to mean, "No business ranks your pleasure." Already they had returned to the courtesies of peace. She could not answer in a different spirit; she must abide by the idle words he had remembered, and go. Her work here was over. Many of her patients had been sent home, and all were well cared for now.