To my relief, the interview was short, and to my still greater relief it was not made harder for me by the lieutenant’s presence, that gentleman having disappeared after presenting me. Naturally, Sir Henry wanted news of Washington’s army, his dispositions, his plans and intentions; and having by this time come to my own in my heritage of the Page impudence, I lied to him as freely and joyously as I had to Castner, taking care only to make the lies dovetail neatly with what I had told the lieutenant over the inn breakfast-table. But my cross-examiner saved his shrewdest question for the last, as if he had been a lawyer. “Now, for yourself, Mr. Page,” he said finally, fixing me with that cold stare that seemed to read my inmost thoughts. “What brought you here?” This was a harder thing to lie out of than any of the others. My family, and my own record, for that matter, were too well known to let me dish him up some plausible story of how we were all merely waiting the chance to come over to the king’s side. I must invent some personal grievance, and with those chilling eyes upon me it was a task to make the blood thicken in my veins--at a time when it should have been galloping most freely. It was at this point that I had an inspiration. There is no lie so compelling as the truth, when the truth can be made to serve the purpose of a lie. I had heard that Sir Henry frowned like a straight-laced Puritan upon dueling; that he put it under the ban for his own officers, punishing for it as he would for any other infraction of orders. My resolve was taken on the spur of the moment. “Aside from one other cause, which was great enough in itself to make me wish to change flags, I ran away from a duel,” I told him, returning the stare as hardily as I dared. “How is that, sir?” he demanded, a shade less coldly. At that I gave him the story of the quarrel with Seytoun, coloring it only so much as to make it appear that dueling was the accepted code in our army, and that the entire ostracising pressure of my late fellow officers had been put upon me to drive me into a corner from which there was no escape save in the course I had taken. “You have conscientious scruples, Mr. Page?” he asked, after what seemed an interminable weighing and balancing of my tale. “You may call them so, if you wish, Sir Henry,” I replied gravely. “I have no desire to kill or to be killed in such a cause. And since, if I had stayed, I should certainly have had to fight this Captain Seytoun, I put this with the other, and possibly better, reason, and crossed the lines.” “And that other reason?” he questioned shrewdly. “Speak plainly, Mr. Page. You stand upon the dividing line between some honorable occupation with us on one hand, and the prison hulks on the other.” I saw that my excuse was not big enough, and tremblingly tore another page out of the book of truth.