“Honored Excellency, the Gouverneur Faulkner, of the State of
    Harpeth: 

    “I go from you into the trenches of France.  If your humble boy
    Robert has done for you any small service, I beg of you in
    that name that my Uncle, the General Robert, and my friends
    never know of my dishonor of lies about my woman’s estate, but
    believe me to die as a soldier for France as will be the case. 
    Make all clear for me to my Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles. 
    It is that all women are not lies. 
          Roberta, Marquise of Grez and Bye.”

Then I left that letter upon the doorstep, held in place by the weight of a stone, and very softly slipped out into the shadows of the twilight and down the mountain by the path up which that morning I had come with my beloved Gouverneur Faulkner, then my friend.  I felt a certainty that as many as two hours would those men continue in a consulting with that wild Jim and in that time by going fleetingly I could gain the place where were tethered the horses, before a complete darkness had come.  From my honored father I had learned the ways of woods in hunting and also I knew that the good Lightfoot would in darkness carry me in safety to his stall in the barn of Mr. Bud Bell, beside which stood my Cherry.  From there I could gain the city of Hayesville in the dead hours of the night and in those same dead hours depart to France, after obtaining the money I had left in my desk and which I had earned by my labors and would not be in the act of stealing from the State of Harpeth.  Only one night and day would I be alone in the forest and I did not care if a death should overtake me.  In my body my heart was dead and why should I desire the life of that body?

And as I had planned I then accomplished.  I discovered that Lightfoot at pasture and I quickly had placed the saddle upon him and had turned him down the mountain to choose a safe path for both himself and me.  I did not look upon those cradles of fragrant boughs in which the boy Robert had lain at rest beside his great friend, the Gouverneur Faulkner, from whom he had stolen faith and affection.

“Why did not you also steal his pocketbook as he lay asleep beside you, Roberta, Marquise of Grez and Bye?” I questioned myself with scorn and torture, as good Lightfoot crashed down from that Camp Heaven into the dark night.

And on we rode, the large horse with the woman upon his back, for a long night, through fragrant thickets that caught at my riding breeches with rose tendril fingers and under thick forests of budding trees, through whose branches of tender leaves the wise old stars looked down upon my bitter weeping with nothing of comfort, perhaps because they had grown of a hardness of heart from having seen so many tears of women drop in the silence of a lonely night.