That was all, and it was signed only with her initial. I read it through twice and then again to gain time. For Dick was waiting. "'Tis a mere formal matter of business," said I, when I could put him off no longer. "Business?" he queried, the red light of suspicion coming and going in his eye. "What business can you have with Mistress Madge Stair, pray?" "'Tis about--it touches the title to Appleby Hundred," said I, equivocating as clumsily as a schoolboy caught in a fault. "Of course you know that the confiscation act of the North Carolina Congress re-established my right and title to the estate?" "No," said he; "you never told me." Then: "She writes you about this?" "About a matter touching it, as I say." "As you did not say," he growled; after which a silence came and sat between us, I holding the open letter in my hand and he staring gloomily at the back of it. When the silence grew portentous I told him of my design to go a-spying. He looked me in the eye and his smile was not pleasant to see. "You are lying most clumsily, Jack; or at best you are telling me but half the truth. You are going to see Mistress Margery." "That is altogether as it may happen," I retorted, striving hard to keep down the flame of insensate rivalry which his accusings always kindled in me. "It is not. Winnsborough is neither London nor yet Philadelphia, that you may miss her in the crowd. And you do not mean to miss her." "Well? And if I do chance to see her--what then?" "Don't mad me, Jack. You should know by this what a fool she has made of me." "'Tis your own folly," I rejoined hotly. "You should blame neither the lady nor the man to whom she has given nothing save--" "Save what?" he broke in savagely. I recoiled on the brink as I had so many times before. The months of waiting for the death I craved had hardened me. "Save a thing you would value lightly enough without her love. Let us have done with this bickering; find the colonel and ask his leave to go with me, if you like. Then you may do the love-making whilst I do the spying." "No," said he; "not while you stand it upon such a leg as that." I reached across and gripped his hand and wrung it. "Shall we never have the better of these senseless vaporings?" I cried. "'Tis as you say; I can neither live sane nor die mad without another sight of her, Dick, and that is the plain truth. And yet, mark me, this next seeing of her will surely set a thing in train that will make her yours and not mine. Get your leave and come with me on your own terms. Mayhap she will show you how little she cares for me, and how much she cares for you." So this is how it came about that we two, garbed as decent planters and mounted upon the sleekest cobs the regiment afforded, took the road for Winnsborough together on a certain summer-fine morning in January in the year of battles, seventeen hundred and eighty-one. XLV IN WHICH WE FIND WHAT WE NEVER SOUGHT