I stared at her with all the contempt I could throw into my gaze. “Cipher writing!” I said. “Certainly I have come into this wilderness to learn strange things! Cipher writing! But enough—and too much!” I continued wrathfully. “I am not used to have my honor doubted. When your father returns I shall refer the matter to him and I shall ask him if I am to be assailed under his roof—assailed in a manner as insulting as it is outrageous!” “I will ask him myself,” she said in a much lower tone. “If I am wrong I am sorry. But Colonel Marion told me—” “That I was not to communicate with my friends? Am I doing it? But, no,” I concluded loftily, “I will not discuss it. I will refer the matter to your father.” And I turned my back on her without much courtesy—the attack was so wanton, so silly! I heard her move away and go into the house. She was crazy, positively crazy, I thought. What was it to her whether I wrote or did not write? What was it to her if I did communicate with my friends? She was not my keeper, she could not judge of the risk or the importance of the step which Marion had forbidden. Placed as we were within less than seventy miles of the British Headquarters and within the scope of a cavalry raid, he was doubtless right in making the stipulation. But what did she know of it? What was it to her? Why should she attach importance to the matter? Confound her impudence! I might be one of the bare-footed slaves trudging through the heat, I might be a wretched Sambo fresh from Guinea, and she could scarcely treat me with greater contumely. She was a fury, a perfect fury, and as passionate as she was beautiful! But I would speak plainly to Wilmer. I would tell him that I was his prisoner, and owed something to him, but that I could not, and would not, be subject to his daughter’s whims and caprices. Write? Why should I not write? Sheets, quires, reams if I pleased, so long as I did not forward. And how in heaven’s name was I to forward? Through whom? Did she suppose that the postman called once a day as in Eastcheap and Change Alley? The whole thing was monstrous! Monstrous! I waited, fuming, for Wilmer’s return from the fields, and meantime the delay brought to my mind another grievance, though one which I could not name. I had supposed that when he came back, after leaving Marion, I should be invited to make one at the common table. But no invitation had reached me, my meals were still served apart, and this seemed absurd in a house in which life was pleasantly primitive. Certainly this was a minor complaint. But he who has lived for months with men whom a common danger has rendered respectable but could not render congenial, he to whom a woman’s voice has grown strange and the decencies of home a memory, will understand what I felt when scraps of Aunt Lyddy’s chatter, the girl’s grave voice, the cackle of Mammy Jack’s laughter came to me—outside.