"Yes, your own betrothed," repeated the American, highly excited, "the wife of your affection and your choice, who has been held up to calumny and scorn. Think of that, Gerald; she on whose fond bosom you are to repose your aching head, she who glories in her beauty only because it is beauty in your eyes, has been betrayed, accused of a vile passion for a slave; yet he--the fiend who has done this grievous wrong--he who has stamped your wife with ignominy, and even published her shame--still lives. Within a week," she resumed in a voice hoarse from exhaustion, "yes, within a week, Gerald he will be here--perhaps to deride and contemn you for the choice you have made." "Within a week he dies," exclaimed the youth. "Matilda, come what will, he dies. Life is death without you, and with you even crime may sit lightly on my soul. But we will fly far from the habitations of men. The forest shall be my home, and when the past recurs to me you shall smile upon me with that smile, look upon me with that look, and I will forget all. Yes," he pursued, with a fierce excitement snatching up the holy book, and again carrying it to his lips, "once more I repeat my oath. He who has thus wronged you, my own Matilda, dies--dies by the hand of Gerald Grantham--of your affianced husband." There was another long embrace, after which the plan of operations was distinctly explained and decided upon. They then separated for the night--the infatuated Gerald, with a load of guilt at his heart no effort of his reason could remove, returning by the route he had followed on the preceding evening to his residence in the town. CHAPTER XXVIII. Leaving the lost Gerald for a time to all the horrors of his position, in which it would be difficult to say whether remorse or passion (each intensest of its kind) predominated, let us return to the scene where we first introduced him to the reader, and take a review of the military events passing in that quarter.