Here was another chance to tell him what he should be told, but the words would not say themselves.

“I stood within arm’s reach of you that night,” said I; and from that I hastened swiftly through the story of my trial as a spy and what it came to in the morning, and never mentioned Margery’s part in it at all.

“You have a bitter enemy in Frank Falconnet,” was his comment, when I had made an end of this recounting of my adventures.  “He knows you are in hiding hereabouts, and has been scouring the neighborhood well for you—­or, more belike, for both of us.”

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“I have both seen and heard.  This den of ours opens on the river’s edge, and, two days since, his Indians came within an ace of nabbing me.  ’Twas just at dusk, and I made out to dodge them by doubling past in the canoe.”

“But you say you have heard, as well?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Don’t ask me, Jack.”

I said I had no right to ask more than he chose to tell; and at this he blurted out an oath and let me have the sharp-edged truth.

“Falconnet has an ally whose wit is shrewder than his.  Can you guess who it is?”

“No.”

“’Tis this same Madge Stair you have been defending, Jack,” he said, bitterly.  “It seems that Falconnet made sure we had both gone to join the army, which was but natural.  If she were less than the spiteful little Tory vixen that she is, she would have been content to let it rest so.  But she would not let it rest so.  With her own lips she assured Falconnet he still had us to reckon with; nay, more—­she made a boast of it that we would never go so far away from her.”

Weak and fever-shaken as I was, I yet made shift to get upon my elbow feebly fierce, denouncing it hotly for a lie.

“Who slandered her like this, Dick?  Put a name to the cur, and as I live and get my strength again, I’ll hunt him down and choke him with that lie!”

“Nay,” he objected soberly; “that would be my quarrel, were there ever a peg to hang a quarrel on.  But it came by a sure hand, and one that is friendly enough to all concerned.  An old free borderer, Ephraim Yeates by name, brought me the tale.  He had been spying round at Appleby Hundred, wanting to know, for some purpose of his own, why the redcoats and Cherokees were hanging on so long; and this much he overheard one night when he was outlying under the window of the withdrawing-room.  He says she was in a pretty passion at the baronet’s slackness, stamping her foot at him and lashing him with the taunt that he was afeard of one or both of us.”

I fell back on the bearskins to shut my eyes and call up all the might of love to grapple with this fresh misery.  It was in this fierce conflict of faith against apparent fact that I descried the parting of the ways for the lover and the husband.

Jennifer believed this most incredible thing, and yet he loved her—­would go on loving her, as he had said, in spite of all.  That was the lover’s road, and I could never bear him company on it.  Could I believe her so pitiless cruel as this, I made sure no husband-love could live beyond that moment of conviction.