then and now!" she sighed.

For a time we could find nothing fit to say. At last I was forced to
bring up one thing I did not like to mention.

"Miss Grace," said I, seating myself beside her, "last night, or rather
this morning, after midnight, I found a man prowling around in the
yard."

She sprang up as though shocked, her face gray, her eyes full of terror.

"You have told!" she exclaimed, "My father knows that Captain Orme--"

It was my own turn to feel surprise, which perhaps I showed.

"I have told no one. It seemed to me that first I ought to come to you
and ask you about this. Why was Orme there?"

She stared at me. "He told me he would come back some time," she
admitted at length. All the while she was fighting with herself,
striving, exactly as Orme had done, to husband her powers for an
impending struggle. "You see," she added, "he has secret business all
over the country--I will own I believe him to be in the secret service
of the inner circle of a number of Southern congressmen and business
men. He is in with the Southern circle--of New Orleans, of
Charleston--Washington. For this reason he could not always choose his
hours of going and coming."

"Does your father know of his peculiar hours?"

"I presume so, of course."

"I saw a light at a window," I began, "whose window I do not know,
doubtless some servant's. It could not have been a signal?"

"A _signal_? What do you mean? Do you suspect me of putting out a beacon
light for a cheap night adventure with some man? Do you expect me to
tolerate that sort of thing from you?"

"I ask you to tolerate nothing," I said. "I am not in the habit of
suspecting ladies. But I ask you if you can explain the light on that
side of the house."

"Jack," she said, flinging out a hand, "forgive me. I admit that Captain
Orme and I carried on a bit of a flirtation, after he came back--after
he had told me about you. But why should that--why, he did not know you
were here."

"No," said I, dryly, "I don't think he did. I am glad to know that you
found something to amuse you in my absence."

"Let us not speak of amusements in the absence of each other," she said
bitterly. "Think of your own. But when you came back, it was all as it
was last spring. I could love no other man but you, Jack, and you know
it. After all, if we are quits, let us stay quits, and forgive, and
forget--let us forget, Jack."

I sat looking at her as she turned to me, pleading, imploring