as much by me when the power
suddenly became yours. It was a strange war between us, and I accepted
its conditions. To-day, when the power was mine again, mine to bring you
at last to subjection, behold, I have capitulated at your bidding, and
all that I held--including your own self--have I relinquished. It is
perhaps fitting. Haply I am punished for having wed you before I
had wooed you." Again his tone changed, it grew more cold, more
matter-of-fact. "I rode this way a little while ago a hunted man, my
only hope to reach home and collect what moneys and valuables I could
carry, and make for the coast to find a vessel bound for Holland. I
have been engaged, as you know, in stirring up rebellion to check the
iniquities and persecutions that are toward in a land I love. I'll not
weary you with details. Time was needed for this as for all things, and
by next spring, perhaps, had matters gone well, this vineyard that so
carefully and secretly I have been tending, would have been, maybe, in
condition to bear fruit. Even now, in the hour of my flight, I learn
that others have come to force this delicate growth into sudden
maturity. There! Soon ripe, soon rotten. The Duke of Monmouth has landed
at Lyme this morning. I am riding to him."

"To what end?" she cried, and he saw in her face a dismay that amounted
almost to fear, and he wondered was it for him.

"To place my sword at his service. Were I not encompassed by this
ruin, I should not have stirred a foot in that direction--so rash, so
foredoomed to failure is this invasion. As it is,"--he shrugged and
laughed--"it is the only hope--all forlorn though it may be--for me."

The trammels she had imposed upon her soul fell away at that like bonds
of cobweb. She laid her hand upon his wrists, tears stood in her eyes;
her lips quivered.

"Anthony, forgive me," she besought him. He trembled under her touch,
under the caress of her voice, and at the sound of his name for the
first time upon her lips.

"What have I to forgive?" he asked.

"The thing that I did in the matter of that letter."

"You poor child," said he, smiling gently upon her, "you did it in
self-defence."

"Yet say that you forgive me--say it before you go!" she begged him.

He considered her gravely a moment. "To what end," he asked, "do you
imagine that I have talked so much? To the end that I might show you
that however I may have wronged you I have at the last made some amends;
and that for the sa