“No,” she contradicted; “you came to bring a letter for Margaret. You came to fetch and carry for that dreadful man--as his lackey!”--and here the beautiful eyes burnt me, they were so indignant hot. “I should have come anyhow,” I asserted. “But I was glad to bring Mistress Margaret her letter: that was a service to her rather than to Mr. Arnold.” “Call him ‘General,’ Mr. Page; he is your general, isn’t he?” she scoffed. “So he says, and so he thinks, and so I call him, when I have to. But you must not think, because I am wearing this coat, that I am over-proud of it, or of my service in what we have lately been calling the ‘Traitors’ Legion,’ on the other side of the Neutral Ground.” “Then, why are you in it?” she demanded. “Why, why, _why_?” “It is a long story,” I stammered, “and there is less time for telling it now than there was last night. But tell me; how is it that you are here in New York, when I thought you were safe in Virginia?” “It is a long story,” she mimicked, “and there is less time for telling it now than there was last night, Mr. Richard Page.” “But I shall stay until I have heard it,” I retorted hardily. “Oh, if I must ask Mistress Vandeventer to give you the guest-room otherwise, you may know; there is no such mighty mystery about _my_ goings and comings,” she said, with a toss of the pretty head. “There was a ship-load of the Leigh tobacco snapped up by one of the British ships and brought here as a prize. But word came to us at Sevenoaks through good Mr.--no, on second thought, I won’t tell you our friend’s name--through a gentleman of Philadelphia, that it could be ransomed if any Leigh were bold enough to venture for it. There was no one else to venture, so I came. And I have got my prize redeemed, and I am going home again in a few days, or as soon as Cousin Julianna Pettus comes from Philadelphia to sail with me. There now--make the most of it, Mr. Turncoat British-officer Page! Or will you turn traitor to me, too, and have my father’s tobacco seized again?” It was all very hard; doubly hard now, because my mission, which only a day earlier had held out hopes of a speedy despatching, now stretched out into an indefinite future, and was by so much the more unspeakable to her or to any living soul. But I set her mind at rest about the retrieved tobacco; if, indeed, she thought so small of me as to suspect for a moment that, even as a turncoat, I would turn informer. “I am no exciseman, whatever else you have written against me in your black books,” I said, and if half the gloom I felt was in the words, she should have pitied me. Perhaps she did, for from standing, she took the chair lately occupied by Margaret Shippen, and nodded me airily to my own. “I must not forget my manners, even if Mr. Page does sometimes forget his,” was her wording of the permission to sit beside her.