ot if it's helped by traitors in your camp!"

"What?--But how should you, a woman, know of such a matter?"

"You'll see, when the honours are distributed."

"This is very strange. You are in this officer's confidence, perhaps.
He is unwise to trust you so far--you have told me enough to--"

"There's no more need of secrecy. Captain Falconer's men are well on
their way to Morristown. Even if you got out of our lines as easily as
you got in, you could only meet our troops returning with your
general."

Doubtless she conceived that by taunting him, at this safe hour, with
this prevision of her success, she helped the estrangement which she
felt necessary to her enjoyment of her expected rewards.

"Oho!" quoth he, with a bitter, derisive laugh. "Another attempt to
seize Washington! What folly!"

"Not when we are helped by treason in your camp, as I said before.
Folly, is it? You'll sing another song to-morrow!"

She smiled with anticipated triumph, and the smile had in it so much
of the Madge of other days, that his bitterness forsook him, and
admiration and love returned to sharpen his grief.

"Oh, Madge, dear, could I but win you back!" he murmured, wistfully.

"What, in that strain again!" she said, petulant at each revival of
the self-reproach his sorrow caused in her.

"Ay, if I had but the chance! If I might be with you long enough, if I
might reawaken the old tenderness!--But I forget; treason in our camp,
you say. There is danger, then--ay, there's always the possibility.
The devil's in it, that I must tear myself from you now; that I must
part with you while matters are so wrong between us; that I must leave
you when I would give ten years of life for one hour to win your love
back! But you will take my hand, let me kiss you once--you will do
that for the sake of the old times--and then I will be gone!"

"Be gone? Where?"

"Back to camp, of course, to give warning of this expedition."

"'Tis impossible! Tis hours--"

"'Tis not impossible--I will outride them. They wouldn't have started
before dark."

"You would only overtake them, at your best. Do you think they would
let you pass?"

"Poh! I know every road. I can ride around them. I'll put the army in
readiness for 'em, treason or no treason! For the present, good-bye--"

The look in his face--of power and resolution--gave her a sudden sense
of her triumph slipping out of her grasp.

"You must not go!" she cried, quite awakened to the peril