"He commanded the Eastern Military District of North Carolina, you know, and--and--" She broke off abruptly. "Oh, dear! My foot's asleep--terribly! Will you put a cushion under it for me?" "One minute," he said. "I don't quite make this out. If your uncle commanded a military district here during the war, he must have been a Federal general, a man of distinction, yet you--" "My foot's asleep, and prickles dreadfully." "Just a moment." She could feel the growing fixedness of his glance. "I--remember--this sort of thing has happened before. On the island--Rincoteague--when I asked you what you knew about Madge Yarnell, you suddenly discovered that it was raining. This morning, too, something was said about your mother, and somehow the sail got adrift at that very moment. You had hold of it. And just now your foot falls asleep in the nick of time. Betty, I don't like this sort of thing! I've had enough confidence in you to marry you--to marry you very much in the dark. Isn't it fair you should have confidence in me, a little?" She was listening with half-averted face and a smile that baffled him. As he watched her, a score of confusing recollections rushed through his mind like fiery phantoms: Madge Yarnell's recognition of the envelope received from White Cottage; her determined effort to accompany him thither the next day; her theatric assault upon them, whip in hand, on the road from Jim George's--even yet he found it hard to believe that they had narrowly escaped a tragedy! Harry Cleborne, Fessenden had then imagined, had warned him against his pursuit of an innocent country girl, and had puzzled him by obscure reference to another man, and on top of this had denied all knowledge of Betty Landis. He recalled a hundred reticences and reservations on the part of Betty, natural enough at the time, but now possessed of a disturbing significance. Her knowledge of the world; her voice and bearing; the words she had let slip of her mother, of her Baltimore friends and school, of her uncle, the Union general! What did these things mean? Light began to break upon him. Madge had not pressed upon them that day because she had discovered only him where she had expected to find Danton. Cleborne had really babbled of Danton and the Other Lady. Danton himself, in their talk on the beach at Kitty Hawk, had said that the Other had been in seclusion--hiding from his pursuit of her--in a farmhouse on the Eastern Shore. He towered over Betty in sudden fury. "What! What _is_ all this? Who are you? Who are you, I say?" The smile died from the girl's lips, and she shrank before his white face and fierce eyes. Shame and rage so choked him that his words were almost incoherent, but they were the more terrible for that. She cowered away from him to the very limits of the gunwale. "Oh, please!" she said. "Don't! Don't! Oh, please!" The tenderness he had lately felt for her came over him in a wave as he looked down at the shrinking figure.