“You are bitter, Dick,” she said, and now she made no secret of her anxious sympathy. “You were always a hot-head, ready to quarrel and fight and take offense where none was meant. But I’ll do you the justice to say that heretofore you’ve always made reparation like a gentleman when your mad fit had passed. But now this dreadful thing is beyond repair--or is it?” I could lie joyously enough to forward the enterprise which Mr. Hamilton had sent me on, but I could not lie to her who was the heart of my heart, even by implication. “No,” I said; “it is not beyond repair.” She caught eagerly at my reply. “Then you have already repented of this rashest, most wretched passion-flight you ever made, Dick?--you have thought of--of going back to your--to Colonel--” I laid a finger on my lips and slipped past her to see that the door in the passageway to the drawing-room was fully closed. “What you are asking me to say would find me a rope very quickly if it came to other ears,” I cautioned, lowering my voice. Then in the same hurried half-whisper, and fearing every moment lest we should be interrupted: “What I have admitted thus far has been the truth in every word. But you must trust me, Beatrix; trust me in spite of everything. And you must not ask me to tell you more.” “But you’ll promise me, Dick,--” she began. There was the sound of a gently-closing door and steps in the passage--warnings she did not hear. Again there came that quick shuttling of the mind that covers all the moves of a desperate game in an eye-sweep that can not be measured for its lightning-like swiftness. She was a daughter of the Virginia Leighs, with a father and three brothers in the patriot army. I was a deserter and always to be suspected until I had actually drawn blood in the king’s service. For any of the Tory revelers to find us here together in cool converse.... I saw the shadow of the gibbet hanging plainly over me when I took her suddenly in my arms and stopped what might have been my death-warrant with a kiss on the sweet lips of pleading. There was a little tableau among the roses in the glass house, with an audience of only one to see it. While a clock might have ticked twice she lay in my arms like some frightened wild thing. For all we had grown up together, I had never let her see the masterful side of me lover-wise, and I do think she was shocked beyond speech or struggling.