When I awakened from what seemed in the memory of it the most unresting sleep I ever had, it was no longer night, and I was stretched upon the oaken settle in that same lumber garret where I had been bedded through that other night of hiding.  So much I saw at the waking glance; and then I realized, vaguely at first, but presently with startling emphasis, that it was the westering sun which was shining in at the high roof windows, that the shackles were still on, and that my temples were throbbing with a most skull-splitting headache.

Being fair agasp with astoundment at this new spinning of fate’s wheel, I sprang up quickly—­and was as quickly glad to fall back upon the pallet.  For with the upstart a heaving nausea came to supplement the headache, and for a long time I lay bat-blind and sick as any landsman in his first gale at sea.

The sunlight was fading from the high windows, and I was deep sunk in a sick man’s megrims, before aught came to disturb the silence of the cobwebbed garret.  From nausea and racking pains I had come to the stage of querulous self-pity.  ’Twas monstrous, this burying a man alive, ill, fettered, uncared-for, to live or die in utter solitude as might happen.  I could not remotely guess to whom I owed this dismal fate, and was too petulant to speculate upon it.  But the meddler, friend or foe, who had bereft me of my chance to die whilst I was fit and ready, came in for a Turkish cursing—­the curse that calls down in all the Osmanli variants the same pangs in duplicate upon the banned one.

It was in the midst of one of these impotent fits of malediction that the wainscot door was opened and closed softly, and light footsteps tiptoed to my bedside.  I shut my eyes wilfully when a voice low and tender asked:  “Are you awake, Monsieur John?”

I hope you will hold me forgiven, my dears, if I confess that what with the nausea and the headache, the fetters and the solitude, I was rabid enough to rail at her.  ’Twas so near dusk in the ill-lighted garret that I could not see how she took it; but she let me know by word of mouth.

“Merci, Monsieur,” she said, icily.  And then:  “Gratitude does not seem to be amongst your gifts.”

At this I broke out in all a sick man’s pettishness.

“Gratitude!  Mayhap you will tell me what it is I have to be grateful for.  All I craved was the chance to die as a soldier should, and some one must needs spoil me of that!”

“Selfish—­selfish always and to the last,” she murmured.  “Do you never give a moment’s thought to the feelings of others, Captain Ireton?”

This was past all endurance.

“If I had not, should I be here this moment?” I raved.  “You do make me sicker than I was, my lady.”

“Yet I say you are selfish,” she insisted.  “What have I done that you should come here to have yourself hanged for a spy?”

“Let us have plain speech, in God’s name,” I retorted.  “You know well enough there was no better way in which I could serve you.”