The sight of her standing a-tiptoe to touch off the candles on the chimney breast set the old lovespell at work to make my heart beat faster.  What if there were a hint of truth in Gilbert Stair’s wrathful protest?  What if, after all, she cared less for Richard and more for me?

Do not, I pray you, my dears, think too hardly of the man who thus lays bare the secret thoughts of his heart for you.  ’Twas but a passing gust of the tempest of disloyalty, and I was not swept wholly from my moorings.  Nay, when she came to sit on the hassock at my feet, as she used to do in that other halcyon-time of convalescence, I was myself again and could look upon her sweet face with eyes that saw beyond her to the camp or battle-field where my dear lad was spending himself.

For a time we sat in silence, and ’twas she who spoke first.

“My father has been with you,” she said.  “I hope you did not quarrel with him.”

“No,” I denied, salving my conscience with the remembering that it takes two to make a quarrel; and I had done none of the cursing.  “He came to give me this,” I added, handing her the will.

She opened the folded parchment, reading a line of it here and there softly to herself.

—­“’Being of sound mind, doth bequeath and devise to his loving wife, Margery—­’ Ah, had you been writing it you would not have written it so, would you, Monsieur John?”

“’Tis but a form,” I would say.  “All wives are ‘loving’ in lawyers’ speech.”

She smiled up at me so like an innocent and fearless child that for the moment I could figure her no otherwise.  Yet her rejoinder was a woman’s.

“I say you would not have written it so; is not that the truth?”

I would not let her pin me down.

“If I should write it now, it should be written in great letters, dear lady.  Though it is but a form, though that which followed was but another form, you have not failed in any wifely duty, Mistress Margery.”

“Not once?”

“No, not once.  Three times you have done what the lovingest wife could do to save a husband’s life; and I do greatly suspect there was a fourth and earlier time.  Tell me, little one; was it not you who sent the Indian to Captain Forney to tell him a patriot spy was to be executed at day-dawn in the oak glade?”

She would not answer me direct.

“’Twas I who brought you to that pass,” she said, speaking soft and low.  “But for my riding down upon you one other morning in that same oak glade, you would not have had Sir Francis Falconnet’s sword in your shoulder.  And but for that sword wound, nothing that followed would have followed.”

Saying this she fell silent for a space, and when she spoke again she was become by some subtle transmutation my trusting little maid of the by-gone halcyon-time.

“Do you remember how you used to make a comrade of me in the old days, Monsieur John, telling me things my elder brother might have told me, had I had one?”