My whole being was wrapped in a storm and my bosom caged a whirlwind. I could be calm enough, apparently, and yet I was growing aware of that tempest of spirit which shook me like an aspen. I had been dull--dull to the point of crime; but now my wisdom would begin to sharpen and brighten itself. Still, I had so much coolness to call my own that I was glad of the fact of Rivera. I remember thinking on that; for, with no more words than the dumb, he was as secret as a mole and as honest, withal, and single-hearted as a hound. There would be none to know; as Peg said, she had torn a night from eternity to be ours and ours alone. While these thoughts went tumbling down the steeps of my conjecturings, I continued mechanically to caress Peg's hair, and it felt like a web of gossamer in my coarse fingers. “Contemn you, child!” said I, and my voice was not much louder than had been hers, and I bent down my head so that she might hear; “contemn you! I would as soon impeach the snow outside, new given from the sky, denouncing it for soot.” Peg began to weep, and I could hear the sharp catching of her sobs. Suddenly the moan came sighing up to me: “Oh, if there were no such word as right or justice or duty, but only love--just love!” Then with a quick backward twist of her form that was like an impulse, and as replete of a swift grace as any suppleness of that long ago leopard whereof she would so often make me think, Peg turned herself in my arms, and with her own encircling my neck lay crying on my bosom. I held her close--closer. I could tell the beating of her heart, count the footfalls of her nature as though she were parcel of myself. How I loved her! adored her!--my prone spirit would fall on its knees to her for its Deity. The while, too, and with my soul at these prayers, my candor would arrest me for the traitor I was. Where should be that conscience the General spoke on? Or where that honor which was to have been as a sentry to check my strayings? That honor was recreant where love would take the field against it; that conscience was so much apostate of the right it would frame an argument of equity and claim superior liberty for superior love, and be all for carrying Peg away. My boasted manhood was a rope of sand! Even now, as weary-white with years I tell this tale of dead and other days, I yet wonder upon that discovery of myself. This was what I beheld: I had loved Peg from the start; the General's jest was sober truth. I would worship her, and then cheat myself with lie and sophistry to hide my villainy against my own detection. And now when the mask was fallen and I stood face to face with the true image of my infamy, would I still press forward to my sins? Or would I think on the good General, and the pain and the foul stain for each of us which I was about to compass?