"Why, the other one--the son. Lieutenant, is she that monster's wife?" Ferry stroked his horse's neck and said very softly, "She is his wife." I had to wait long for him to say more, but at length, with the same measured mildness, he spoke on. This amazing Charlotte, bereft of father, brother and mother, ward of a light-headed married sister, and in these distracted times lacking any friend with the courage, wisdom and kind activity to probe the pretensions of her suitor, had been literally snared into marriage by this human spider, this Oliver, a man of just the measure to simulate with cunning and patient labor the character, bearing and antecedents of a true and exceptional gentleman for the sake of devouring a glorious woman. "But, eh!" I exclaimed, "how could ever such as she mistake him for--" "Ah, he is, I doubt not, but the burnt-out ruin of what he was half a year ago. You perceive, he has not succeeded; he has not devoured her; actually she has turned his fangs upon himself and has defeated his designs toward her as if by magic. And yet the only magic has been her vigilance, her courage, her sagacity. Smith,"--again he stroked the mane of his charger--"if I tell you--" I gave him no pledge but a look. "Since the hour of her marriage she has never gone into her chamber without locking the door; she has never come out of it unarmed." I remarked that had I been in her place I should either have sunk into the mire, so to speak, or thrown myself, literally, into the river. "Yes," he responded, "but not she! Her life is still hers; she will neither give it away nor throw it away. She wants it, and she wants it whole." "Did she say that to you?" He looked at me in wide surprise. "Ah! could you think she would speak with me on that subject? No, I have learned what I know from a man we shall meet to-day; the brother of Major Harper; and he, he has it from--" my companion smiled--"somebody you have known a pretty long time, I think, eh?" "I see; I see; you mean my mother!" He let me ponder the fact a long time. "Lieutenant," I asked at length, "did you know your plot against the two Olivers would cross her wishes?" "Ah!" was his quick response, "it crossed mine, like-wise. But, you know, this life we have to live, it is never for two people only." "No," I replied, with my eagerness to moralize, "no two persons, and above all no one man and one woman, can ever be sure of their duty, or even of their happiness, till they consider at least one third person,--" "Hoh!" interrupted Ferry, in the manner of one to whom the fact was somehow of the most immediate and lively practical interest, "and to consider a thousand is better." Then, after a pause, "Yes," he said, "I know she could not like that move, but you remember our talk of yesterday, where we first met?"