“What is it you would have me do, Captain Ireton?”

“Nothing,” I made haste to say; “nothing save to believe that I came here unwittingly—­and to let me go.”

“Where will you go?  The town is alive with those who would—­who would—­”

“Who would show me scant mercy, you would say.  True; and yet I came hither—­to the town, I mean—­of my own free will.”

Her mood changed in the pivoting fraction of an instant, and now the beautiful eyes were alight and warm and pleadingly eloquent.

“Oh, why did you come?  Are you—­are you what they said you were?”

“A spy?  If I am, you would scarce expect me to confess it, even to you.”

“’Tis dishonorable—­most dishonorable!” she cried.  “I could respect a brave soldier enemy; but a spy—­”

There was a clattering of hoofs in the street and a jingle of sword-scabbards on the door-stone.  I wheeled to face the newcomers, determined now to front it boldly as a desperate man at bay.  But before the fumbling hands without could find the door-knob Margery was beside me, all a-flutter in a trembling-fit of excitement.

“Up the stair, quickly, pour l’amour de Dieu!” she whispered; and we were at the clock landing when the great door opened and some half-dozen king’s officers came in.  We crouched together behind the balustrade till they should pass beyond the sight of us, and in the group I marked a man stout and heavy built, walking full solidly for his two-and-forty years.  He wore his own hair dressed high in front in the fashion first set for the women by the Grand Monarque’s loose-wife; and as he passed under the candles I saw that it was graying slightly.  His face, high-browed, long-nosed, double-chinned, with the eyes womanish for bigness and marked with brows that might have been penciled by the hair-dresser, I had seen before; but lacking this present sight of it, the orders on his breast would have named him the ranking general of the army in the field—­Lord Charles Cornwallis.  With all the houses in the town to choose among, I had blundered into this—­my Lord’s own headquarters.

I had but a passing glimpse of the incoming group, for when it was well beneath the turn of the stair, my lady had me up and running again, driving me on before her to the chamber floor above, along a dimly lighted corridor with many turnings, and so to a cul-de-sac in the same—­a doorless passage with a high dormer window in the end and no other apparent means of egress.

Margery had snatched a candle from one of the corridor holders in the flight, and now she bade me sit on the floor and draw my boots.  I did it, shamefacedly enough, being but a foul and ragged vagabond unfit to have her come anigh me.  But I might have spared my blushings for she had turned her back and was opening a secret door in the high wainscot.

Beyond the door lay a raftered garret half filled with cast-off house lumber and lighted and aired by two high roof windows.  Into this she led me, with a finger on her lip for silence.  A hum of voices, the clinking of glass, and now and again a hearty soldier laugh told me that my garret was above some living-room of the house.