Soundly she lectured Joscelyn at times, but the fault-finding always began and ended with a caress, so there was no sting in it. Here the girl sometimes met Betty; and the older woman, seeing the desire of their hearts shining in their faces, encouraged them to be friends. Here, too, Janet Cameron often came, and after the visit walked home openly with her arm in Joscelyn’s, making merry little mouths at Mistress Bryce as they passed her door. These visits and walks were Joscelyn’s chief pleasure, and she stood sorely in need of recreation, for of late she was thinner and more irritable than her mother had ever seen her.
“You need a course of bitters,” Mistress Strudwick said, opening her medicine-box one day.
“I have been taking such a course for eight years.”
“Yes, Amanda Bryce’s tongue drips not with honey! But I shall talk with your mother, and between us we will take you in hand and get the edge off your nerves.” So Joscelyn dutifully yielded herself to her two physicians, who took much delight in the teas and tonics they brewed for her.
During all these autumn and winter weeks, Richard Clevering had lain in the field hospital at Yorktown, racked with pain and fever from the wound he got when—singing a song of the Carolina hills—his regiment stormed that gun-girt bastion on the British left, and the colonies were free!
Things would have gone better with him had he been content to lie still and let the bones knit; but he could not stay away from that last scene of the surrender, which made all the privations of the past worth while. To miss that was to miss the joy of life, the glory of the fight, the crown of the conqueror; and so he had pretended to be much stronger than he was, and had gone to stand in his place when the British, with silent drums and cased banners, marched from their surrendered fortifications, and stacked arms between the martial lines of French and Continentals. The sight compensated him for the pain the exertion entailed, so that he never complained when, afterwards, the surgeon shook his head gravely over the fever that flushed his veins. He had had his heart’s desire; he would bear its results.
But in the early part of January, seeing a tedious recovery still ahead of him, and the hospital facilities being so limited, he asked to be sent home to be cared for by his own people. There would be no more fighting, and his stay was an unnecessary burden upon the army officials, whose hands were full trying to keep down the spirit of insurrection that was fermenting the camp over the delay in the soldiers’ pay. To relieve the strain upon the moneyless army coffers, many of the men who had been invalided were allowed to return to their homes. Thus it was, that Joscelyn, unconscious of the extent of the hurt that had come to him—for he had written no particulars home—and also of his dismissal, answered a knock at her door one bleak January day, and gave a great cry at sight of the weary man leaning against the veranda railing, with an empty sleeve pinned helplessly to the bandaged arm beneath.
“Richard Clevering!”