"Are you the man who came with Sir John Fenwick to the shore?" she cried, stepping back a pace--she had already risen, "And betrayed him? Dick! Dick, don't say it!" she continued hurriedly, holding out her hands as if she would ward off my words. "Don't say that you are _that_ man! I had forgotten until this moment whom I came to see; who, they said, was here." Her words stung me, even as her face frightened me. But while I winced a kind of courage, born of indignation and of a sense of injustice long endured, came to me; and I answered her with spirit. "No," I said, "I am not that man." "No?" she cried. "No!" I said defiantly. "If you mean the man that betrayed Sir John Fenwick. But I will tell you what man I am--if you will listen to me." "What are yon going to tell me?" she answered, the troubled look returning. And then, "Dick, don't lie to me!" she cried quickly. "I have no need," I said. And with that, beginning at the beginning, I told her all the story which is written here, so far as it was not already known to her. She listened in silence, standing over me with something of the severity of a judge, until I came to the start from London with Matthew Smith. There she interrupted me. "One moment," she said in a hard voice; and she fixed me with keen, unfriendly eyes. "You know that Sir John Fenwick was taken two days later, and is in the Tower?" "I know nothing," I said, holding out my hands and trembling with the excitement of my story, and the thought of my sufferings. "Not even that?" "No, nothing; not even that," I said. "Nor that within a month, in all probability, he will be tried and executed!" "No." "Nor that your master is in peril? You have not heard that Sir John has turned on him and denounced him before the Council of the King?" "No," I said. "How should I?" "What?" she cried incredulously. "You do not know that with which all England is ringing--though it touches you of all men?" "How should I?" I said feebly. "Who would tell me here? And for weeks I have been ill." She nodded. "Go on," she said. I obeyed. I took up the thread again, told her how we reached Ashford, how I saw Sir John, how I fled, and how I was pursued; finally how I was received on board the boat, and never, until the following day, when Birkenhead flung it in my teeth, guessed that I had forestalled Sir John, and robbed him of his one chance of escape. "For if I had known," I continued warmly, "why should I fly from him? What had I to fear from him? Or what to gain, if Smith with a pistol were not at my heels, by leaving England? Gain?" I continued bitterly, seeing that I had convinced her. "What _did_ I gain? This! This!" And I touched my crippled leg. "Thank God!" she said, with emotion. "Thank God, Dick. But----" "But what!" I retorted sharply; for in the telling of the story I had come to see more clearly than before how cruelly I had been treated. "But what?"