Margaret bore this injustice with “a great patience.” That had, however, but little power to disarm the lady, whose resentment continued for weeks. Drearily passed the time to the hapless girl--the long desolate months brightened by the rare days when she would receive a visit from one of her two friends, Grace or Clare, or else get letters from her father or Ralph Houston. Toward the spring, the news from camp held out the prospect of Mr. Houston’s possible return home. And to Ralph’s arrival poor Margaret looked forward with more of dread than hope. CHAPTER XII. THE DAUGHTER’S FIDELITY. “Still through each change of fortune strange, Racked nerve and brain all burning, Her loving faith to given trust Knew never shade of turning.” More than fifteen months have elapsed since the close of the last chapter--months, replete with the destiny of nations as of individuals. First, the prospects of peace through the mediation of the Emperor of Russia, or by any other means, seemed indefinitely postponed. The desired return of the long-absent soldiers to their homes, was a distant and doubtful hope. The war continued to be prosecuted on both sides with unremitting animosity. Cockburn was on the Chesapeake. Now I know not whether history has softened, or tradition exaggerated the fierceness, rapacity, and cruelty of this licensed pirate and his crew. History tells of quiet farmsteads razed to the ground and peaceful villages burned to ashes. Tradition speaks of individual instances of monstrous atrocity, that resulted in the madness or death of the innocent victim. But whatever may stand recorded in history, or be believed in distant regions, concerning the conduct of the British fleet in the Chesapeake--here on the scene of action, here along the shores and among the isles of the Bay, the memory of Rear Admiral Cockburn and his crew, is, justly or unjustly, loaded with almost preternatural abhorrence. The villages of Havre de Grace, Frenchtown, Fredericktown, Georgetown and Hampton, and other unguarded hamlets, whose natural protectors were absent at the distant theatres of the war, were successively assaulted, sacked and burned, while their helpless inhabitants, consisting of old men, women and children, were put to the sword, hunted away or carried off. The massacre on Craney Island, with all its concomitant horrors of debauchery, madness and violence, had carried consternation into every heart. Marauding parties were frequently landed to lay waste defenceless farmsteads, whose masters were absent on the Northern frontier.