“But I can’t keep away,” he answered mildly. “I must come and go. I can’t let the plantation go to ruin. Times are bad enough and hard enough—we may be burnt out any night. But until the worst comes I must keep things together, Con, you know that. It’s fortunate that we’re above King’s Mountain. After this Tarleton and his Greens—d—n the fellow, I wish he had been there to-day—will spread over the south side like a swarm of wasps flocking to the honey-pot. But they’ll be shy of pushing as far north of Winsboro’ as this—we’re too strong hereabouts. For the Englishman I’d send him to the cabins at once, but he wouldn’t be safe from our folks outside the house.” She spoke up suddenly. “If they come for him,” she cried, “I warn you, father, I shall not raise a finger to save him!” “Pooh! pooh!” “I vow I will not! So now you know!” “Well, I don’t think that they’ll come,” he replied lightly. “They know me, and—” “To shelter a Britisher!” “I’ve sheltered worse men,” he responded reasonably. “At least you’ve had warning!” she retorted—and I heard the legs of a chair grate on the floor of the outer room. “If I have to choose, your little finger is more to me than the lives of twenty such as he!” “Unfortunately,” he answered dryly, “it’s not my little finger, my dear, that’s in peril! It’s my—” “Father!” she cried, pain in her voice. “How can you! How can you!” “There, there,” he said, soothing her, “a man can but die once, and how he dies does not matter much! Courage, Con, courage, girl! Many is the awkward corner I have been in, as you know, and I’ve got out of it. You may be sure I shall take all the care I can.” “But you don’t!” she retorted. “You don’t! Or you would never let this man—” I lost the rest in the movement of a second chair. For some minutes the two blacks had made hardly a pretence of attending to me. They had listened with all their ears. Once or twice when what was said had touched me nearly they had goggled their eyes at me between wonder and amazement. And I, too, wondered. I, too, saw that here was something that needed explanation. Why should this girl, scarcely out of her teens—I judged her to be no more that twenty—feel so strongly, so cruelly, so inhumanly? Why should she show herself so hard, so unnatural, where even her father betrayed the touch of nature that makes us all akin? This was a question, but it was one that I must consider to-morrow. For the present I was too comfortable, too drowsy, too weary. Sleep pressed on me irresistibly—the blessed sleep of the exhausted, of the wounded, of the broken, who are at last at rest! The room grew hazy, the light a dim halo. And yet before I slept I had a last impression of the things about me.