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.
"Susanna, will you be brave enough for this? Can you make up your mind to be a soldier's wife, even before the war has closed? I had not thought to ask you so soon; but year after year passes by, and though nearer and ever nearer to the goal of peace, the clouds still hang in the sky, and there is still stern work for the soldier to do. But we seem now to see the end of the long, long war, and that a happy end; and so I ask if you can marry me, even with the chances of one of those separations which wring the heart and entail so much anxiety and sorrow upon the wife left at home."
She was clinging to him even before he had done, shedding tears, and yet half laughing as she looked with dewy eyes into his face.
"O Fritz, Fritz, don't you understand yet what a woman's love is like? As though I would not rather a hundred thousand times be your wife, come what may in the future, than live the safest and most sheltered life without you! As though I should not glory and delight to share the perils and hardships you are called upon to endure! As though being together would not make up a hundredfold for everything else!"