“Peggy,” exclaimed Harriet startled by the girl’s haggard looks, “you will make yourself ill by so much grieving. I doubt that ’tis best for you to keep your room as you do. Remember how you made me shake off the megrims by exertion in Philadelphia? Well, I shall play the physician now, and make you bestir yourself. She should, shouldn’t she, father?”
Colonel Owen looked up from his place at the head of the table and regarded the maiden disapprovingly.
“Peggy is a foolish little girl,” he remarked with some sharpness. “Captain Drayton hath returned to his true allegiance, and I see no reason why such a show of grief should be deemed necessary. ’Tis not only unseemly, but vastly indelicate as well. As for action, not only she but all of us will have to move whether we choose or not. The army goes on the march again to-morrow.”
“Where, father?” asked Harriet in surprise. “Is ‘t not a sudden determination on his lordship’s part?”
“Somewhat. He hath received an express from General Sir Henry Clinton which says that all movements of the rebel general indicate a determination to attack New York City. Washington hath been joined by the French troops, and the activities of the allies denote a settled purpose which hath alarmed Sir Henry for the safety of the city. Therefore, he desires the earl to send him some troops, which will leave his lordship too weak to hold this place. In consequence we are off to-morrow for Portsmouth across the James. Zounds!” he burst forth grumblingly. “I don’t mind campaigning in seasonable weather, but this hot climate makes a move of any sort an exertion not to be undertaken save by compulsion.”
“Must we go, father?” pouted Harriet, “Could you not get leave of absence, and continue here? We are so comfortable.”
“Stay here to become a prisoner of war, my dear?” questioned her father sarcastically. “Methought you were abreast of war news sufficiently to know that that boy general of a Frenchman hath kept within a dozen miles of us of late. The army will scarcely be out of here before he marches in. Egad! but he needs a lesson. His lordship merely laughs when I tell him so, and declares that the boy cannot escape him. He will attend to him in time. Nay, Harriet; we shall have to go, though I confess to a strong disinclination to move.”
The occupation of Williamsburg by the army under Cornwallis lasted nine days; that of Portsmouth was little more than thrice that time, for upon the engineers reporting that the site was one that could not be fortified the British general put his troops aboard such shipping as he could gather and transferred them bodily to Yorktown. Here he set the army and the negroes who had followed them to laying out lines of earthworks, that he might hold the post with the reduced number of troops that would be left him after detaching the reinforcements needed by Clinton. And now ensued a pause in the daily excitements and operations of the Virginia campaign.
Yorktown was not much more than a village. It had been an emporium of trade before the Revolution, while Williamsburg was the capital of the state. The site of the town was beautiful in the extreme, stretching from east to west on the south side of the noble York River, a small distance above where the river empties into Chesapeake Bay.
Both Peggy and Harriet rejoiced in the change, and much of their time was spent on the high point of land to the east of the village which gave outlook upon Chesapeake Bay, gazing at the wide expanse of water. Upon several of these occasions Peggy encountered Drayton, but the two merely looked at each other without speaking, the girl with eyes full of reproach, the youth with an expression that was unfathomable. Harriet now began to twit her unmercifully upon her change of attitude toward him.