“He was doing his duty, sir,” answered Peggy, and her eyes flashed with such fire that he laughed, well pleased that he could rouse her. “His duty, eh? And did duty call him so strongly that he could leave a girl alone to face what might be certain death? We English would call it another name.” “Then you English would know nothing of true courage,” she retorted. “He is a patriot, and his duty must come before everything else. Thee will find, if thee has not already found, Colonel Tarleton, that these uncouth rascals, as thee terms them, are not so wanting in spirit as thy words imply.” “No; ’fore George, they are not,” he exclaimed. “And now unravel your story to me. Your whole history, while we go on to Camden. ’Tis a goodly distance, and ’twill serve to make me forget this hurt.” “Doth it pain thee so much?” she asked tremulously, the soft light of pity and sorrow springing again to her eyes. “Oh, yes,” he answered grimly. “But now your story, mistress. And leave out no part of it. I wish to know of all your treasonable doings so as to make your punishment commensurable with your merits.” And Peggy, suppressing that part of her narrative that related to the army, told him how she had been taken to New York, of the shipwreck, and about her efforts to reach her home. “And so Colonel Owen of the Welsh Fusileers is your cousin,” he mused. “Methought that I had seen you somewhere, and now I know that it must have been at his house. Would you like to stay with your cousin and his daughter until I decide upon your punishment?” “Thee did not understand, I fear me,” she exclaimed with a startled glance. “I could not stay with them because they were lost at sea. Does thee not remember that I said they were on the ‘Falcon’?” “True; but you could not see for the fog what happened after you left in the small boat. They were rescued by another schooner, the ‘Rose,’ which I was on myself. We escaped serious injury in the storm, and came across the ‘Falcon’ just in time to rescue the crew and skipper, and those officers and others who happened to be aboard.” For a short time Peggy was so overcome that she could not speak, but at last she murmured faintly: “Oh, I am glad, glad!” “What sort of girl are you,” he asked abruptly, “that you rejoice over their rescue? They were unkind to you, by your own telling. Why should you feel joy that they are living?” “They are my kinspeople,” she said. “And sometimes they were kind. Had it not been for Harriet I would not have been in the little boat. She made me enter it when to remain on the ‘Falcon’ seemed certain death. She knew not that they would be rescued.” “Perhaps not,” he remarked dryly. “Although I have never known Mistress Harriet Owen to do one act that had not an underlying motive. But I should not speak so to one who sees no wrong in others.”