“You’ve found a way to make me speak, sir, and I wish you joy of it.  ’Twas I who bribed your sentry, and I did go to Captain Ireton’s room.”

The colonel laughed and shot a gibe sharp at my enemy.

“How is this, Sir Francis.  Did I not tell you you had thrust an inch or so too high?  By God, sir, I think you will come over-late, if ever you do come at all.  This captain-emeritus hath forestalled you beautifully.”

As more than once before in this eventful night, the air went flaming red before my eyes and helpless wrath came uppermost.  I saw no way to clear her, and had there been the plainest way, dumb rage would still have held me tongue-tied.  So I could only mop and mow and stammer, and, when the words were found, make shift to blunder out that such an accusation did the lady grievous wrong; that she had come attended and at my beseeching, to take a message from a dying man to one who was his friend.

For my pains I had a brutal laugh in payment; a laugh that, starting with the colonel, went the rounds in jeering grins of incredulity.  And on the heels of it the colonel swore afresh, cursing me for a clumsy liar.

“A likely story, that!” he scoffed.  “Next you will say she knew not what this message was.”

“I said it once.  She knew not what the message was, nor why I sent it.”

I felt her eyes upon me as I spoke, and turned to find them full of tearful pleading.  “Oh, tell the truth!” she whispered.  “Don’t you see?  He has the letter!”

I looked, and sure enough he held it in his hand; and then I understood the flash of irony in the sloe-black eyes of him.

“You lie clumsily, Captain Ireton, though it is a gentlemanly lie and does you honor.  But we have trapped you fairly and you may as well make a clean breast of it.  Your mistress knew very well what you would have her do, and since she is your mistress, went to do it.”

While he was speaking I had a thought white-hot from some forge-fire of inspiration—­a thought to tip an arrow of conviction and set it quivering in the mark.  I would not stop to measure it; to look aside at her or any other lest one brief glance apart should send the arrow wavering from its course.  So I looked the colonel boldly in the eye and drew the bow and sped the shaft.

“You think no other than a mistress would have done this, Colonel Tarleton—­that it was done for love?  Well, so it was; but with the love there went a duty.”

“A duty, say you?  How is that?”

I bowed as best I might, being so tightly bound; then fixed his eye again.

“You had forgot that honor is not wholly dead, sir.  This lady is my wife.”

XI

HOW A LIE WAS MADE THE VERY TRUTH

For some small instant I dared not loose my eye-grip on the colonel, to glance aside at Falconnet, or Gilbert Stair, or at the woman close beside me.  If I had flinched or wavered, or let an eyelid droop but by the thickness of a hair, this keen-eyed colonel would have been upon me to cut the ground beneath my feet and leave me dangling by the lie.