“Indeed, it was a great wrong you did that night, sir.  I could wish, as heartily as you, that it might be undone.  But this is idle talk.  Let me see if this key will fit your manacles.  I have been all day finding out who had it, and I am not sure it will be the right one, after all.”

But it did prove to be the right one; and when the irons were off I felt more like a man and less like a baited bear.

“That is better,” said I, drawing breath of unfeigned relief.  “I bear my Lord Charles no malice, but ’twas a needless precaution, this ironing of a man who was never minded to run away.”

“But you are going to run away,” she said, decisively; “and that as soon as ever you are able to hold a horse between your knees.  Shall I bring you another dish of tea?  Nay, never look so horrified; I shall not poison you this time.”

“Stay,” I cried.  “You mean that you are going to help me escape?  ’Tis a needless prolonging of the agony.  Go and tell the guards where they can find me.”

She stopped midway to the wainscot door and turned to give me my answer.

“No; you are a soldier, and—­and I will not be a gallows-widow.  Do you hear, sir?  If you are so eager to die, there is always the battle-field.”  And with that she left me.

I may pass over the two succeeding days in the silence I was condemned to endure through the major part of them.  After that first visit, Margery came only at stated intervals to bring me food and drink, and my nurse was an old black beldame, either deaf and dumb, or else so newly from the Guinea Coast as to be unable to twist her tongue to the English.

And in the food-bringings I could neither make my lady stay nor answer any question; this though I was hungering to know what was going on beyond the walls of my garret prison.  Indeed, she would not even tell me how I had been spirited away from the two sergeants keeping watch over me in her father’s strong-room below stairs.  “That is Scipio’s secret,” she would say, laughing at me, “and he shall keep it.”

But in the evening of the third day the mystery bubble was burst, and I learned from Margery’s lips the thing I longed to know.  Lord Cornwallis had decided to abandon North Carolina, and in an hour or two the army would be in motion for withdrawal to the southward.

“Now, thanks be to God!” I said, most fervently.  “King’s Mountain has begun the good work, and we shall show Farmer George a thing or two he had not guessed.”

On this, my lady drew herself up most proudly and her lip curled.

“You forget, sir, you are speaking to Mr. Gilbert Stair’s daughter.”

“True,” said I; “I did forget.  We are at cross purposes in this, as in all things else.  I crave your pardon, Madam.”

Her eyes were snapping by now.  Never tell me, my dears, that eyes of the blue-gray can not flash fire when they will.

“How painstakingly you will go about to make me hate you!” she burst out.  And then, all in the same breath:  “But you will be rid of me presently, for good and all.”