Percy had not seen Bee since he left her, a slip of a girl, to go on to York, a year before, and for an instant he hardly recognized this silk-robed, pale-faced young woman, with her haughty poise, and flashing eyes. Then she was speaking to him, passionately and impulsively, repeating what Ned had told her at York, until he said, so sternly that she started at him--"That's enough, Bee, this is the first time you have shown yourself untrue to the Haslem name, let it be the last. Vere has his faults, but no man of our family could be a coward or lie." "My name is Goode, sir," said Bee, at white heat now, "and I am sorry that I am half a Haslem if their family pride makes them blind to the vices of a relative. Sir, I demand that you send me across to my brother--to my father's people." "Bee!" exclaimed Betty aghast, but Percy, after a keen look at the girl, said slowly and sternly--"I have just come from considering Ned Edgar's case. If he admits to having been afraid to deliver the note at York, we can pardon his panic--seeing what his record has been since--on his first day under fire, unless he persists in this attempt to smirch the name of another man." Bee read a threat to Ned in the emphasis Percy put on his last words, and she forgot herself, thinking of Ned's possible danger. Then in came Sir John, furious, for Vere had given him his version of the red welt on his face, but the angry words on the old man's lips were checked as he saw the child he had left at York shot up into young womanhood--"Bless me," he exclaimed, "I didn't know you." She made a mocking little courtesy to him. "My cousin did not know me either, it would seem, sir. I met a sick soldier and was driving him home, when Vere met us and spoke insultingly to me; I hope sir, you will say I did right to strike him." "Bless me," Sir John repeated helplessly. "I don't know what the world is coming to." He was relieved at hearing the summons to dinner then, the dinner which was to publicly announce the betrothal of Vere and Bee. Such family arrangements for the marriage of young people who hardly knew one another were not uncommon then, and the guests did not pay particular attention to the sulky boy, who felt that he hated this "Yankee girl," as he called her in his heart, who had so openly shown that she was on his enemy's side. And the girl herself, who in white-faced silence heard her grandfather's speech, felt trapped, believing that if she resisted it meant further injustice and suffering for Ned. The evening was almost over when Archy got Bee away by herself. "I thought you would like to know about Ned," he said bluntly. "He just wouldn't say anything, only that him or Vere Haslem was a blamed liar, and we could decide which it was." "What are you going to do with him?" "Because of what he did here, he will be pardoned for what he did, or didn't, at York." "Then you don't think he is guilty?"