ural terror slipping
from her like a cast-off garment, and a sweet dignity coming to clothe
her in a queenlier robe, making her, as I would think, more beautiful
than ever.

"I thank you, Sir Francis--for myself and for poor Jeanne," she said.
"You have come to take us back to my father?"

He bowed again and spread his hands as a friend willing but helpless.

"Upon my honor, my dear lady, nothing would give me greater pleasure.
But what can I say? We are upon the king's business, as you well know,
and our mission will not brook an hour's delay--indeed, we are here
only by the good chance which led your captors to choose our route for
theirs. I have no alternative but to take you and your woman with us to
the west; but I do assure you--"

She stopped him with an impassioned gesture of dissent, and darting a
despairing glance around that minded me of some poor hunted thing
hopelessly enmeshed in the net of the fowler, she clasped her hands and
wrung them, breaking down piteously at the last, and begging him by all
that men hold sacred to send her and her maid back to her father, if
only with a single soldier for a guard.

'Twas then we had to drag my dear lad down and hold him fast, else he
had flung himself into the torrent in some mad endeavor to spend his
life for her. So I know not in what false phrase the baronet refused
her, but when I looked again she was no longer pleading as his
suppliant; she was standing before him in the martyr steadfastness of a
true, clean-hearted woman at bay.

"Then you will not by so much undo the wrong you have done me, Captain
Falconnet?" she said.

"A wrong? How then; do you call it a wrong to rescue you from these
brutal savages, Mistress Margery?"

She took a step nearer, and though the dry-stick blaze was dying down
and I could no longer see her face distinctly, I knew well how the
scornful eyes were whipping him.

"Listen!" she said. "When you set Tallachama and his braves upon us in
the road that night, you were not cautious enough, Captain Falconnet. I
saw and heard you. More than that, Tallachama and the others have spoken
freely of your plans in their own tongue, not knowing that my poor
Jeanne had been three years a captive among the Telliquos."

The attack was so sudden-sharp and so completely a surprise that he was
taken off his guard, else I made sure he would not at such a time have
dropped the gentlemanly mask to stand forth the confessed ravisher.

"So ho?