"Not so fast, young lady. I don't know, and the only way to find out, is to wait and watch them both. The liar will act the coward and lie again, sure." "You may have to wait a long time for that; and while you are watching both, you treat Vere Haslem as if he were innocent, and Ned as if he were guilty. You are cruelly hard on him." "There's a heap of hard things in life; one of them is that the day we clear Ned, we break Sir John's heart." * * * And Bee, who remembered that she loved her grandfather, shivered. She had not expected to sleep that night, but health and youth asserted themselves and she rested well, and woke in the sunny morning feeling that somehow things could not be as bad as she had thought them in the night. She was greatly helped to this comparative cheerfulness by a talk she heard under her window, where Ferguson was energetically telling Kawque, the Mohawk scout, the story of Ned and Vere. The Indian grunted such emphatic assent to Ferguson's belief in his friend, that Bee was half comforted. At least Ned had true friends. Ferguson's friendship was doubly warm now that he knew the reason for Ned's "backsliding", and it helped the boy through the ordeal of returning to his comrades, reduced in rank. Ferguson had ridden home with Percy that evening, and the men had scattered to their messes, busy getting supper and preparing for the night. Each mess consisted of about a dozen men who divided the work among them, the non-commissioned officers always being exempt. Ned, to whom no one had yet spoken, picked up a pail to fetch water, washing to take his part in the work before he was ordered to by the sergeant. But Tim snatched the pail from him. "Me Swaddler friend," he said earnestly, "unless you are wishful to go back to hospital immediate, you won't try to work round this mess." Perplexed, Ned looked at his sergeant, but that man only said, "Better put off arguing with Tim for a few years, Ned, you haven't the weight to stand up to him yet." So Ned knew he had been tried and acquitted by a very powerful court--the opinion of the men among whom he lived. After hearing of Ned's condemnation at Kingston the regiment had talked of nothing else for a week. They had also compared notes with a company just arrived, and decided which man had lied. Now with rough delicacy they let Ned know what their verdict had been, and that they knew his reduction was only temporary. * * * Betty had moved to St. Davids, a village by Queenston Heights, where Percy and Sir John came often, and Vere seldom. He managed to find duties, any duties, to keep him from meeting the fiancée he now detested. And still Sir John delighted in Bee's brightness, and believed that in practically forcing her to marry Vere he was doing the best for the girl he really loved, and for the family whose honour was rooted in his heart.