When that leaven began to work in me I was fit for the daringest thing that offered; so I paused to ask if my Lord Cornwallis were yet in the house.

“He is writing letters in his bed-room,” was her answer.

“If you will show me the way thither I shall be your poor debtor by that much more.”

“I will not—­unless you first tell me what you mean to do.”  She said it firmly, but now I was fronting death and could be as firm as she.

“If you will not show me the way, I shall find it for myself.”  So much I said; but as for telling her that I meant to save his Lordship and all the others the trouble of running me down, I could not do that.

“You are going to give yourself up,” she said; and when I would not deny it, she darted before me and set her back against the wainscot door.  “’Tis folly, folly!” she cried.  “He would but pull the bell-cord and—­”

“And give the order that Colonel Tarleton’s sentence be executed upon me, you would say.  Be it so.  But in that event I can at least clear you and your father of any complicity in my hiding.”

“I say you shall not go!”

What touch of savagery is it in a man that will not suffer him to let a woman, loved or unloved, stand in the last resort against his will?  At any other time I would have pleaded with her; would have ended, mayhap, by weakly deferring to her wish.  But now—­well, you must remember, my dears, that I was the trapped rat.  I took her gently in my arms, set her aside, and stepped out into the corridor.

I looked for nothing less than a volcano-burst of righteous indignation to pay me out for this piece of tyranny.  But now, as twice or thrice before, my lady showed me how little a man may know of a woman’s moods.

“You need not be so masterful rough with me,” she said, with a pouting of the sweet lips that set me back upon that thought of a wayward child wanting to be kissed.  “If you say I must, I am in duty bound to show you the way.”  And so she led on and I followed, in a deeper maze than any she had ever set me in.

Arrived at a pair of doors in the main passage, she showed me the one that opened to my Lord’s bed-chamber and ran away; ran with her hands to her face as if to shut out a sight which would not bear looking upon.

I turned my back stiffly upon this newer wonder, pulled myself together and rapped on the door.  A voice within bade me enter; the door opened under my hand and I stood in the presence of the man who, as I made no doubt, would shortly summon his guards and have me out to my rope and tree.

XXXIV

HOW I MET A GREAT LORD AS MAN TO MAN

The room in which I found myself was the guest-chamber, furnished luxuriously, for that day and place, in French-fashioned mahogany and gilt.  The bed was high and richly canopied, as befitted a peer’s resting place; there was a square of Turkish drugget on the floor, a cheerful fire burning in the chimney arch, and on the small table whereat the occupant of the guest-room had lately breakfasted, a goodly display of the Ireton silver.