broke silence by saying passionately:
"Never speak about this to me again, Corp, as long as you live.
Promise me that. Promise never to mention it to anyone. I want no one
to know what I did to-day, and no one will ever know unless you tell;
the boy can't tell, for we are strangers to him."

"He thinks you are a Captain Ure, and that I'm Alexander Bett, his
servant," said Corp. "I telled him that for a divert."

"Then let him continue to think that."

Of course Corp promised. "And I'll go to the stake afore I break my
promise," he swore, happily remembering one of the Jacobite oaths. But
he was puzzled. They would make so much of Tommy if they knew. They
would think him a wonder. Did he not want that?

"No," Tommy replied.

"You used to like it; you used to like it most michty."

"I have changed."

"Ay, you have; but since when? Since you took to making printed
books?"

Tommy did not say, but it was more recently than that. What he was
surrendering no one could have needed to be told less than he; the
magnitude of the sacrifice was what enabled him to make it. He was
always at home among the superlatives; it was the little things that
bothered him. In his present fear of the ride that sentimentality
might yet goad him to, he craved for mastery over self; he knew that
his struggles with his Familiar usually ended in an embrace, and he
had made a passionate vow that it should be so no longer. The best
beginning of the new man was to deny himself the glory that would be
his if his deed were advertised to the world. Even Grizel must never
know of it--Grizel, whose admiration was so dear to him. Thus he
punished himself, and again I think he deserves respect.

CHAPTER X

GAVINIA ON THE TRACK

Corp, you remember, had said that he would go to the stake rather than
break his promise; and he meant it, too, though what the stake was,
and why such a pother about going to it, he did not know. He was to
learn now, however, for to the stake he had to go. This was because
Gavinia, when folding up his clothes, found in one of the pockets a
glove wrapped in silk paper.

Tommy had forgotten it until too late, for when he asked Corp for the
glove it was already in Gavinia's possession, and she had declined to
return it without an explanation. "You must tell her nothing," Tommy
said sternly. He was uneasy, but relieved to find that Corp did not
know whose glove it was, nor even why gentlemen carry a lady's glove
in