Dick was sitting by the newly-kindled fire, nursing his knees and most palpably waiting for me to wake and find my missive.

“What is it?” I asked, eying the ominous thing distrustfully.

“’Tis a letter, as you see.  Uncanoola left it.”  Then, most surlily:  “’Tis from Madge, and to you.  There is your name on the back of it.”

At this I must needs read the letter, with the lad looking on as if he would eat me.  ’Twas dated at Winnsborough, and was brief and to the point.

    Monsieur: 

“When last we met you said the Church might undo what the Church had done.  I have spoken to the good Pere Matthieu, and he has consented to write to the Holy Father at Rome.  But it is necessary that he should have your declaration.  Since the matter is of your own seeking, mayhap you can devise a way to communicate with Pere Matthieu, who is at present with us under our borrowed roof here."_

That was all, and it was signed only with her initial.  I read it through twice and then again to gain time.  For Dick was waiting.

“’Tis a mere formal matter of business,” said I, when I could put him off no longer.

“Business?” he queried, the red light of suspicion coming and going in his eye.  “What business can you have with Mistress Madge Stair, pray?”

“’Tis about—­it touches the title to Appleby Hundred,” said I, equivocating as clumsily as a schoolboy caught in a fault.  “Of course you know that the confiscation act of the North Carolina Congress re-established my right and title to the estate?”

“No,” said he; “you never told me.”  Then:  “She writes you about this?”

“About a matter touching it, as I say.”

“As you did not say,” he growled; after which a silence came and sat between us, I holding the open letter in my hand and he staring gloomily at the back of it.

When the silence grew portentous I told him of my design to go a-spying.  He looked me in the eye and his smile was not pleasant to see.

“You are lying most clumsily, Jack; or at best you are telling me but half the truth.  You are going to see Mistress Margery.”

“That is altogether as it may happen,” I retorted, striving hard to keep down the flame of insensate rivalry which his accusings always kindled in me.

“It is not.  Winnsborough is neither London nor yet Philadelphia, that you may miss her in the crowd.  And you do not mean to miss her.”

“Well?  And if I do chance to see her—­what then?”

“Don’t mad me, Jack.  You should know by this what a fool she has made of me.”

“’Tis your own folly,” I rejoined hotly.  “You should blame neither the lady nor the man to whom she has given nothing save—­”

“Save what?” he broke in savagely.

I recoiled on the brink as I had so many times before.  The months of waiting for the death I craved had hardened me.