"Lord Cornwallis has surrendered?" she said calmly to Amanda Bryce and the two gossips, who had run in to tell her the news and to gloat over her discomfiture. "'Tis most courteous of you to bring me the information so swiftly; you are quite out of breath with your race. I shall immediately write my sincere condolences to his lordship that wrong has triumphed over right. Will you not have a cup of tea with me, ladies?--there is no longer any tax. No? Then I have the honour to wish you a very good morning. Pray come again when you have further tidings." She set the door open for them with the air of a sovereign condescending to her subjects; and they went away humiliated and furious. "From the airs she gives herself, one would think Joscelyn Cheshire had royal blood in her veins," they said angrily. But when Mistress Strudwick heard of the scene, she laughed long and heartily. "They deserved it, the carping crones! Would I had been there to see them routed. Thank Heaven her spirit has come back; how I love her for it, unreconstructed Tory as she is!" Never again was Joscelyn to deck herself in her scarlet bodice in honour of an English victory; never again to tease her neighbours with her taunting Tory ballads. The war was over; she had lost her cause; and with her life all out of attune with her surroundings she must face the inevitable. Seeing the relief in her mother's face, she could not be sorry that peace had come, though the terms were bitter; and so even in her loss was there something of compensation. CHAPTER XXVII. HOMECOMINGS. "The bugles sound the swift recall; Cling, clang! backward all! Home, and good night!" --E. C. STEDMAN. The war was over; the drums lay unbeaten, the snarling trumpets sang their songs no more upon the level plains or sloping sides of far blue hills; liberty had triumphed, and the scarlet insignia of kingly rule had gone from the land forever. But peace did not bring the desired order of things. The unstable government of an untrained congress could not control the spirit of maraud and chaos that had so long dominated certain classes of people. Eight years of warfare had left its scar on the whole country, but particularly in those portions where the fighting had fallen. The sanguine among the triumphant contestants had looked for an immediate rehabilitation of affairs, thinking that the taps of war would be the reveille of commerce and order and prosperity. But as yet Americans were better soldiers than statesmen. They had to learn to govern themselves, learn to wield the mighty power they had won; and at first knowledge was slow in coming. Private wrongs were remembered, individual grievances were recalled. The spirit that refrained from shouting over a fallen foe at Yorktown manifested itself at home in many petty ways against the defeated Tories, so that among these latter was a feeling of unprotected helplessness that made them sullen and restive.