I waited long and patiently, and thought she must have gone before her answer came.  And this is what she said: 

“If I must tell you then;’tis now two weeks and more since Sir Francis Falconnet asked me to marry him.  I—­I hope you do feel better, Captain Ireton.”

And with these bitterest of all words to her leave-taking, she left me to endure as best I might the hell of torment they had lighted for me.

VI

SHOWING HOW RED WRATH MAY HEAL A WOUND

It was full two days after the coming of the baronet and the factor-lawyer Pengarvin before I saw my lady’s face near-hand again, and sometimes I was glad for Richard Jennifer’s sake, but oftener would curse and swear because I was bound hand and foot and could not balk my enemy.

I knew Sir Francis and the lawyer still lingered on at Appleby Hundred—­indeed, I saw them daily from my window—­and Darius would be telling me that they waited upon the coming of some courier from the south.  But this I disbelieved.  Some such-like lie the baronet might have told, I thought; but when I saw him walk abroad with Margery on his arm, pacing back and forth beneath the oaks and bending low to catch her lightest word with grave and courtly deference that none knew better how to feign, I knew wherefore he stayed—­knew and raged afresh at my own impotence, and for the thought that Margery was wholly at the mercy of this devil.

Yours is a colder century than was ours, my dears.  Your art has tempered love and passion into sentiment, and hate you have learned to call aversion or dislike.  But we of that simple-hearted elder time were more downright; and I have writ the word I mean in saying that my love was at the mercy of this fiend.

I know not how it is or why, but there are men who have this gift—­some winning way to turn a woman’s head or touch her heart; and I knew well this gift was his.  ’Twas not his face, for that was something less than handsome, to my fancy; nor yet his figure, though that was big and soldierly enough.  It was rather in some subtlety of manner, some power of simulation whereby in any womanly heart he seemed to stand at will for that which he was not.

As I have said, I knew him well enough; knew him incapable of love apart from passion, and that to him there was no sacredness in maiden chastity or wifely vows.  So he but gained his end he cared no whit what followed after; ruin, broken hearts, lost souls, a man slain now and then to keep the scale from tipping—­all were as one to him, or to the Francis Falconnet I knew.

And touching marriage, with Margery or any other, I feared that love would have no word to say.  Passion there might be, and that fierce desire to have and wear which burns like any miser’s fever in the blood; but never love as lovers measure it.  Why, then, had he proposed to Margery?  The answer did not tarry.  Since he was now but a gentleman volunteer it was plain that he had squandered his estate, and so might brook the marriage chain if it were linked up with my father’s acres.