This work finally cleared away, and all done that was proper until the military head of Tryon County, Brigadier Herkimer, should take action, there was time to remember my own affairs. It had been resolved that no word of what we had learned should be made public. The haying had begun, and a panic now would work only disaster by interfering with this most important harvest a day sooner than need be. There was no longer any question of keeping Enoch in prison, but there was a real fear that if he were set at large he might reveal his secret. Hence John Frey suggested that I keep him under my eye, and this jumped with my inclination. Accordingly, when the noon-day heat was somewhat abated, we set out down the Valley road toward the Cedars. There was no horse for him, but he walked with the spring and tirelessness of a grey-hound, his hand on the pommel of my saddle. The four soldiers who had come down from Johnstown followed in our rear, keeping under the shade where they could, and picking berries by the way. The mysterious letter from Philip to his deserted wife lay heavily upon my thoughts. I could not ask Enoch if he knew its contents--which it turned out he did not--but I was unable to keep my mind from speculating upon them. During all these fourteen months Daisy and I had rarely spoken of her recreant ruffian of a husband--or, for that matter, of any other phase of her sad married life. There had been some little constraint between us for a time, after Mr. Stewart's childish babbling about us as still youth and maiden. He never happened to repeat it, and the embarrassment gradually wore away. But we had both been warned by it--if indeed I ought to speak of her as possibly needing such a warning--and by tacit consent the whole subject of her situation was avoided. I did not even tell her that I owed the worst and most lasting of my wounds to Philip. It would only have added to her grief, and impeded the freedom of my arm when the chance for revenge should come. That my heart had been all this while deeply tender toward the poor girl, I need hardly say. I tried to believe that I thought of her only as the dear sister of my childhood, and that I looked upon her when we met with no more than the fondness which may properly glow in a brother's eyes. For the most part I succeeded in believing it, but it is just to add that the neighborhood did not. More than once my mother had angered me by reporting that people talked of my frequent visits to the Cedars, and faint echoes of this gossip had reached my ears from other sources. "You did not stop to see Mistress Cross open her letter, then?" I asked Enoch. "No: why should I? Nothing was said about that. He paid me only to deliver it into her hands." "And what was his mood when he gave it to you?"