“Precisely.  Then let us not fear what the future may have for us.  I have no directions beyond this point,—­Pittsburg.  I was to take boat here, that was all.  I was to convey you out into the West, somewhere, anywhere, no one was to know where.  And someway, anyway, my instructions were, I was to lose you—­to lose you.  Madam, in plain point of fact.  And now, at the very time I am indiscreet enough to tell you this much, you make my cheerful task the more difficult by saying that you must be regarded only as a prisoner of war!”

Serene, smiling, enigmatic, she faced him with no fear whatever showing in her dark eyes.  The clear light of the bright autumn morning had no terrors for youth and health like hers.  She put back a truant curl from her forehead where it had sought egress to the world, and looked him full in the face now, drawing a deep breath which caused the round of her bosom to lift the lace at her throat.  Then, woman-like, she did the unlocked for, and laughed at him, a low, full ripple of wholesome laughter, which evoked again a wave of color to his sensitive face.  Josephine St. Auban was a prisoner,—­a prisoner of state, in fact, and such by orders not understood by herself, although, as she knew very well, a prisoner without due process of law.  Save for this tearful maid who stood yonder, she was alone, friendless.  Her escape, her safety even, lay in her own hands.  Yet, even now, learning for the first time this much definitely regarding the mysterious journey into which she had been entrapped—­even now, a prisoner held fast in some stern and mysterious grasp whose reason and whose nature she could not know—­she laughed, when she should have wept!

“My instructions were to take you out beyond this point,” went on Carlisle; “and then I was to lose you, as I have said.  I have had no definite instructions as to how that should be done, my dear Countess.”  His eyes twinkled as he stiffened to his full height and almost met the level of her own glance.

“The agent who conveyed my orders to me—­he comes from Kentucky, you see—­said to me that while I could not bow-string you, it would be quite proper to put you in a sack and throw you overboard.  ‘Only,’ said he to me, ’be careful that this sack be tightly tied; and be sure to drop her only where the water is deepest.  And for God’s sake, my dear young man,’ he said to me, ’be sure that you do not drop her anywhere along the coast of my own state of Kentucky; for if you do, she will untie the sack and swim ashore into my constituency, where I have trouble enough without the Countess St. Auban, active abolitionist, to increase it.  Trouble ’—­said he to me—­’thy name is Josephine St. Auban!’

“My dear lady, to that last, I agree.  But, there you have my orders.  You are, as may be seen, close to the throne, so far as we have thrones in this country.”

“Then I am safe until we get below the Kentucky shore?” she queried calmly.