"Oh, it wasn't always a matter of choice," rejoined Eunice, for this, Priscilla discovered, was her new friend's name; "some had to come, because they had been too active in the King's cause and the other side would not forgive them. Even after the Peace many were in danger of imprisonment; and then a great many had had all their property confiscated, and thought it would be easier to start over again down here than to live in poverty among their old friends and neighbors."
Priscilla looked in amazement at Eunice. She expressed herself so much more carefully than most girls of her age.
"Martine would call her quaint," thought Priscilla, looking at her, "and if she knows as much about other things as she does about history, she must be a wonder."
"I wish my mother were here," said Eunice, politely. "She gets quite worked up when she talks about the Loyalists."
"I should think she would," responded Priscilla. "They certainly had a hard time."
"She thinks that we have been cut off from things that really are our own, and now, when we have so little money that I can't even afford to go away to college, she feels more and more indignant at the injustice of it all."
Priscilla did not know exactly what to say. In her mind there was a struggle between her feeling of patriotism and her sense of justice. As Eunice had put it, it did not seem fair that the Loyalists should have lost everything, simply because they had had the courage to hold out for the King. But a phrase came into her mind that she had often heard, and for the moment it seemed the only sentiment that she could express.
"After all," she said gently, "I suppose it was the 'fortune of war' that your people suffered so much."
"Oh, yes," responded Eunice, "that is what I often say to my mother; and then I tell her too, that in one hundred and twenty-five years the family probably would have lost all the property they had before the Revolution."
Finding that the subject was getting a little beyond her, Priscilla ventured a more general remark.