Yours is a skeptic age, my dears, and you have learned to scoff at things you do not understand.  But, so long as I shall live, I must believe that agonizing plea was answered.  While yet the anguish of it wrung my soul there came a hasty trampling in the corridor, the sentry’s challenge, and then a quick unbarring of the door.  I turned upon my heel to face a young ensign come with two men at his back to take me to the colonel.

They bound me well and strongly with many wrappings of stout cord before they led me down.  Nor must you think me broken-spirited because I let them.  In any other cause but this I hope I should have fought to die unmanacled; but now I suffered gladly this little, seeing I had made my dear lady suffer so greatly.

When we were come into the room below they let me stand beside her, as I had prayed God they might; and when I stole a glance at her I was fain to think my coming gave her courage and support.  For you must know the place was fair alive with men, and flaring light with torches; and they had never offered her a chair.

The colonel stood apart, the center of a group of officers, and Falconnet was with him.  Hovering on the edges of the group, as if afraid to show themselves too boldly in such a coil, were Gilbert Stair and that smooth parchment-visaged knave, his factor.  The while they thrust me forth to take my place at Margery’s side, the good old priest came and would have joined us; but they would not suffer him.

[Illustration]

So we two stood alone together as we had stood before; but now my lady’s eyes were downcast, and her lips and cheeks were pale.  Yet she was more beautiful than I had ever seen her—­so beautiful that I would swear the sum of all the precious gifts in God’s great universe might be expressed for me in this; that I might die to save her from this shame and agony.

When my guards had thrust me forward, the colonel made short work of our fresh offense.

“’Twas a dastard’s trick, my Captain—­this tangling of the lady in your treason,” he began.  “How did you get your speech with her?”

“That is none of your affair, Colonel Tarleton,” I retorted boldly, thinking that with such a man the shortest word were ever the best.  “Yet I may say that the lady knew not what she did, nor why.  As for my getting speech with her, she was not any way to blame.  I tampered with your sentry.”

“By God, you lie!” was his comment on this.  “She might have tampered with the guard and so got leave to keep a midnight tryst with you, but not you.”  And then to my poor frighted love:  “Have you no shame, Mistress Margery Stair?”

Now I have said that she was changeful as any child or April sky, but never had I seen her pass from mood to mood as she did then.  One moment she stood a woman tremulous and tearful as any woman caught in desperate deed; the next she became a goddess vilified, and if her look had been a dagger I think her flashing eyes had killed him where he stood.