needless prolonging of the agony. Go and tell the guards where they can
find me."

She stopped midway to the wainscot door and turned to give me my answer.

"No; you are a soldier, and--and I will not be a gallows-widow. Do you
hear, sir? If you are so eager to die, there is always the
battle-field." And with that she left me.

I may pass over the two succeeding days in the silence I was condemned
to endure through the major part of them. After that first visit,
Margery came only at stated intervals to bring me food and drink, and my
nurse was an old black beldame, either deaf and dumb, or else so newly
from the Guinea Coast as to be unable to twist her tongue to the
English.

And in the food-bringings I could neither make my lady stay nor answer
any question; this though I was hungering to know what was going on
beyond the walls of my garret prison. Indeed, she would not even tell me
how I had been spirited away from the two sergeants keeping watch over
me in her father's strong-room below stairs. "That is Scipio's secret,"
she would say, laughing at me, "and he shall keep it."

But in the evening of the third day the mystery bubble was burst, and I
learned from Margery's lips the thing I longed to know. Lord Cornwallis
had decided to abandon North Carolina, and in an hour or two the army
would be in motion for withdrawal to the southward.

"Now, thanks be to God!" I said, most fervently. "King's Mountain has
begun the good work, and we shall show Farmer George a thing or two he
had not guessed."

On this, my lady drew herself up most proudly and her lip curled.

"You forget, sir, you are speaking to Mr. Gilbert Stair's daughter."

"True," said I; "I did forget. We are at cross purposes in this, as in
all things else. I crave your pardon, Madam."

Her eyes were snapping by now. Never tell me, my dears, that eyes of the
blue-gray can not flash fire when they will.

"How painstakingly you will go about to make me hate you!" she burst
out. And then, all in the same breath: "But you will be rid of me
presently, for good and all."

"Nay, then, Mistress Margery, you are always taking an ell of meaning
for my inch of speech. 'Tis I who should do the ridding."

"_Mon Dieu!_" she cried, in a sudden burst of petulance; "I am sick to
death of all this! Is there no way out of this coil that is strangling
us both, Captain Ireton?"

"I had thought to make a way three days ago; did so make it, but you
kept me from