She was before me at the meeting place, and there was no laughing welcome in the deep-welled eyes. Instead, they flashed me a look that made me wince. "What folly is this, sir?" she demanded. "Will you never have done taking my honor and your own life into your reckless hands?" I bowed my head to the storm. With the dagger of my miserable errand sticking in my heart there was no fight in me. "I am but come to do your bidding," I said, slowly, for the words cost me sorely in the coin of anguish. "I had your letter, and if you will say how I may find Father Matthieu--" She broke me in the midst. "_Mon Dieu!_" she cried. "Could I guess that you would come here, into the very noose of the gallows? Oh, how you do heap scorn on scorn upon me! Once you made me give silent consent to a falsehood you told; twice, nay, thrice, you have made me disloyal to the king; and now you come again to make me look the world in the face and tell a smiling lie to shield you! O Holy Mother, pity me!" And with this she put her face in her hands and began to sob. Now we were only measurably isolated on the stair, and some sense of the hazard we took--a hazard involving her as well as Richard and myself--steadied me with a sudden shock. "Control yourself," I whispered. "What is done, is done; and the misery is not all yours to suffer. Tell me how I may find the priest, and I will do my errand and begone." "You can not stay to find him now--you must not," she insisted, coming out of the fit of despair with a rebound. "He is in the town--indeed, I know not where he is just now. Can you not endure it a little longer, Captain Ireton?" "No," said I, sullenly. "I have been living a lie all these months to the friend I love best, and I will not do it more." Could I be mistaken? Surely there was a flash not of anger in the eyes that were lifted to mine, and a tremulous note of eagerness in the voice that said: "Then Dick does not know?--you have not told him?" "No; I have told no one." "Poor Dick!" she said softly. "I thought he knew, and I--" She paused, and in the pause it flashed upon me how she had wronged my dear lad; how she had thought he would make brazen love to her knowing she was the wife of another. I thanked God in my heart that I had been able to right him thus far. After a time she said: "Why did you make me marry you, Monsieur John? Oh, I have racked my brain so for the answer to that question. I know you said it was to save my honor. But surely we have paid a heavier penalty than any that could have been laid upon me had you left me as I was." "I was but a short-sighted fool, and no prophet," I rejoined, striving hard to keep the bitterness of soul out of my words. "At the moment it seemed the only way out of the pit of doubt into which my word to Colonel Tarleton had plunged you. But there was another motive. You saw the paper I signed that night, with Lieutenant Tybee and your father's factor for the witnesses?" "Yes."