Given a hearing, Jennifer would have spoiled it all by swearing hotly he had given no parole, but at the word the colonel roared him down like a bull of Bashan, and in the hubbub my brave lad was hustled out.

Though I was full to bursting with my news there was nothing I could do; and when it was fairly over and he was gone, I was right glad he had not seen me.  For I knew well his steel-true loyalty, and that at sight of me in trouble he would have lost his slender chance of guarded liberty, and with it my last hope of sending word across the mountains; though, as for that, the hope was well-nigh dead at any rate.

While Jennifer’s guard and quota were mounting at the door the aide-de-camp returned, and that without the baronet.  I caught but here and there a word of his report; enough to gather that the captain-knight was not yet in from posting out the sentries.

I made no doubt his absence was designed.  He would have Margery believe that he had spared me honorably as an enemy wounded, and so had left me to the tender mercies of his colonel, well assured that Tarleton would not spare me.  And this the colonel did not mean to do, as I was now to hear in brief.

“You put a bold front on, Captain Ireton, but ’tis to no purpose, this time,” he began. “’Tis charged against you that you rode here from the baron’s camp with your commission in your pocket, and came and went within our lines like any other spy.  You are a soldier, sir, and you know that’s hanging.  Yet I will hear you if you’ve anything to say.”

I made so sure that I should hang in any case that it seemed foolish to answer, and so I saved my breath.  Withal he was the terror of our Southland, this tyrant colonel gave me time to consider; and while he waited, grim and silent, the candles on the table guttered and ran down, and the dim light failed till I could no longer see the face of her I loved framed in the archway of the stair.

I thought it hard that I had seen my last of her sweet face thus through thickening shadows, as a dream might fade.  Nevertheless, I would be glad that I had seen her thus, since otherwise, I thought, I must have gone without this last or any other sight of her.

It was while I was still straining my eyes for one more glimpse of her, and while the court room silence deepened dense upon us like the shadows, that Colonel Tarleton signed to those who guarded me.  A hand was laid upon my shoulder, but when I would have turned to go with them a woman’s cry cut sharp into the stillness.  Then, before any one could say a word or think a thought, my dauntless little lady stood beside me, her eyes alight and all her glorious beauty heightened in a blaze of generous emotion.

“For shame!  Colonel Tarleton,” she cried.  “Do you come thus into my father’s house and take a wounded guest and hang him?  You say he is a spy, but that he can not be, for he has lain abed in this same house a month or more.  You shall not hang him!”