"Listen," commanded Agatha. "You are exciting yourself, and that is very bad for you. Besides, it is wholly unnecessary, for I have thought myself not into despair, but into hopefulness, rather. I have devised a plan, the success of which is practically assured in advance, by which you and I are going back into the Confederacy. No, I will not tell you what it is just now. You have excited and wearied yourself too much already. You must go back to your bed now, and sleep for several hours. When you wake, you shall have something to eat, and after that, if I find you sufficiently calm, I will tell you all about it. In the meantime, you may rest easy in your mind, for my plan is sure to succeed, and it will not be difficult of execution." XXVIII _WHEN A MAN TALKS TOO MUCH_ When Baillie had had his rest, he asked Agatha again to tell him of her plans. She explained that it was understood in the little town that he was a French gentleman who had suffered a severe hemorrhage; that as soon as he should be sufficiently recovered, it was his purpose to return to his own country in charge of his French nurse; that she planned in that way to sail with him from New York for Liverpool, where he would be free, as soon as his health should return, to go to the Bahamas and sail thence for Charleston, Wilmington, or some other Southern port, in one of the English blockade-runners that were now making trips almost with the regularity of packets. Baillie approved the plan, though he lamented the length of time its execution must consume. "Agatha," he said,--for since that morning at Fairfax Court-house he had addressed her only by her first name,--"I owe you my life, and I shall owe you my liberty, too, as soon as this admirable plan of yours can be carried out. I owe you, even now, such liberty as I have, for but for you--" "You mustn't forget Sam," she interrupted; "it was he and not I who rescued you from the prison hospital." "O, my appreciation of Sam's devotion is limitless, and my gratitude to him will last so long as I live. But it was you who brought him North; it was you who planned my rescue at terrible risk to yourself, and put Sam in the way of accomplishing it. And the doctor tells me without any sort of qualification that but for your coming to me as a nurse when you did, I should have died certainly and quickly. Don't interrupt me, please, I'm not going to embarrass you with an effort to thank you for what you have done. There is a generosity so great that expressions of thanks in return for it are a mockery--almost an insult, just as an offer to pay for it would be. I shall not speak of these things again--not now at least, not until time and place and circumstance shall be fit. I only want you to know that silence on my part does not signify indifference."