g the
genuineness of her vague wonderment at his concluding words.

"I don't understand you," she said, lifting her eyes to his in a moment
of cold curiosity. "What do you mean?"

"What do I mean? What did Judge Beeswinger mean when he called Captain
Pinckney a double traitor?" he said roughly.

She sprang to her feet with flashing eyes. "And you--YOU! dare to repeat
the cowardly lie of a confessed spy. This, then, is what you wished to
tell me--this the insult for which you have kept me here; because you
are incapable of understanding unselfish patriotism or devotion--even
to your own cause--you dare to judge me by your own base, Yankee-trading
standards. Yes, it is worthy of you!" She walked rapidly up and down,
and then suddenly faced him. "I understand it all; I appreciate your
magnanimity now. You are willing I should join the company of these
chivalrous gentlemen in order to give color to your calumnies! Say at
once that it was you who put up this spy to correspond with me--to come
here--in order to entrap me. Yes entrap me--I--who a moment ago stood up
for you before these gentlemen, and said you could not lie. Bah!"

Struck only by the wild extravagance of her speech and temper, Clarence
did not know that when women are most illogical they are apt to be most
sincere, and from a man's standpoint her unreasoning deductions appeared
to him only as an affectation to gain time for thought, or a theatrical
display, like Susy's. And he was turning half contemptuously away, when
she again faced him with flashing eyes.

"Well, hear me! I accept; I leave here at once, to join my own people,
my own friends--those who understand me--put what construction on it
that you choose. Do your worst; you cannot do more to separate us than
you have done just now."

She left him, and ran up the steps with a singular return of her old
occasional nymph-like nimbleness--the movement of a woman who had never
borne children--and a swish of her long skirts that he remembered
for many a day after, as she disappeared in the corridor. He remained
looking after her--indignant, outraged, and unconvinced. There was a
rattling at the gate.

He remembered he had locked it. He opened it to the flushed pink cheeks
and dancing eyes of Susy. The rain was still dripping from her wet cloak
as she swung it from her shoulders.

"I know it all!--all that's happened," she burst out with half-girlish
exuberance and half the actress's declamation. "We