!" he scoffed. "Next you will say she knew not what
this message was."

"I said it once. She knew not what the message was, nor why I sent it."

I felt her eyes upon me as I spoke, and turned to find them full of
tearful pleading. "Oh, tell the truth!" she whispered. "Don't you see?
He has the letter!"

I looked, and sure enough he held it in his hand; and then I understood
the flash of irony in the sloe-black eyes of him.

"You lie clumsily, Captain Ireton, though it is a gentlemanly lie and
does you honor. But we have trapped you fairly and you may as well make
a clean breast of it. Your mistress knew very well what you would have
her do, and since she is your mistress, went to do it."

While he was speaking I had a thought white-hot from some forge-fire of
inspiration--a thought to tip an arrow of conviction and set it
quivering in the mark. I would not stop to measure it; to look aside at
her or any other lest one brief glance apart should send the arrow
wavering from its course. So I looked the colonel boldly in the eye and
drew the bow and sped the shaft.

"You think no other than a mistress would have done this, Colonel
Tarleton--that it was done for love? Well, so it was; but with the love
there went a duty."

"A duty, say you? How is that?"

I bowed as best I might, being so tightly bound; then fixed his eye
again.

"You had forgot that honor is not wholly dead, sir. This lady is my
wife."

XI

HOW A LIE WAS MADE THE VERY TRUTH

For some small instant I dared not loose my eye-grip on the colonel, to
glance aside at Falconnet, or Gilbert Stair, or at the woman close
beside me. If I had flinched or wavered, or let an eyelid droop but by
the thickness of a hair, this keen-eyed colonel would have been upon me
to cut the ground beneath my feet and leave me dangling by the lie.

But as it was, I faced him down; and winning him, won all. There was a
muttered oath from Falconnet, a tremulous cry of rage from where her
father stood; and then I sought my lady's eyes to read my sentence in
them.

She gave me but a glance, and though I tried as I had never tried before
to read her meaning it was hid from me. But this I marked; that she did
draw aside from me, and that her face was cold and still, and that her
lips were pressed together as if not all nor any should ever make her
speak again.

At this sharp crisis, when a look or word would cost me more than death
and my dear lady her honor, it w