“There is little doubt of it. Indeed, I overheard two men, officers they were in our--in the rebel army, speaking of it only last night, and, naturally, they were lamenting that it had not carried him off before he carried himself off. One of those men had known Mr. Arnold from the beginning, I believe.” For a long minute Castner was silent, and he seemed to have forgotten the supper that the pretty serving maid had brought him. When he spoke he was plumbing me again with the honest eyes--or he thought he was. “It is a hard thing to say, Captain Page,” he said, speaking like a man who has been digging in the very bottom layer of his convictions, “but sometimes I think that an outcome like this which you say is threatening would be the best for all concerned.” “I am sure it would,” I agreed brazenly. But I immediately took the edge off by adding: “For the king’s cause, of course. Mr. Arnold has his abilities; no one will deny that. But however honest he may be in his--ah--convictions, let us say, the obloquy that attaches to eleventh-hour repentances in the popular mind will hamper him, and through him the cause for which he fights.” Castner smiled leniently. “You are a strange young man, Mr. Page. You discuss such matters as if they were as remote from you as the stars. Yet you come under Mr. Arnold’s ban--if it be a ban--yourself.” “Not quite,” I countered hardly. “I have convictions, you see, and I was never living up to them more faithfully than I am at this moment. But now I must beg your leave to go. I am due at Mr. Arnold’s quarters at six o’clock.” It was but a short walk in the starlit evening to the house next door to Sir Henry Clinton’s. There was a soldier on guard at Arnold’s door now, a tall man standing stiffly in the way to stop me until he saw my Loyal American uniform and the captain’s shoulder-knot. Then he let me pass without a word, and also, as I observed, without the salute. Arnold was writing again when I ascended to the working room, and with a nod to me and a wave of the shapely hand toward a chair, he went on for a full hour, I should think, filling sheet after sheet with industrious application and singleness of purpose. It was certainly no lightening of my responsibility that made me sleepy when the quill-scratching grew by and by into a soothing lullaby. But there had been a strenuous night and a none too restful day to follow it, and before I realized that I had been asleep, I awoke to find Sir Judas standing over me, with the gloomy scowl of half-aroused suspicion wrinkling his brow, his hands behind him, and his attitude that of a spy at the windows of the unsuspecting.