Another time I spoke of English beef, saying how it would rebuild a man at need—­how it had made the English soldier what he is.  Whereupon, as before, my loving forager took a hint where none was intended; was gone the night long, and slaughtered me some Tory yearling,—­’twas Mr. Gilbert Stair’s, I mistrusted, though Dick would never name the owner, and so I had a sirloin to my breakfast.

In these and many other ways he spent himself freely for love of me.  If he had been a younger brother of my own blood the common parentage could not have made him tenderer.

’Twas not the mere outgushing of a nature open-armed to make a bosom friend of all the world; nor any feminine softness on his part.  If I have drawn him thus my pen is but a clumsy quill, for he was manly-rough and masterful, with all the native strength and vigor of the border-born.

But on the side of love and friendship no woman ever had a truer heart, a keener eye or a lighter hand.  And in a service for friend or mistress he would spend himself as recklessly as those old knights you read about who made a business of their chivalry.

With his daily offerings of unselfishness to shame me, you may be sure that I was flayed alive; self-flogged like a miserable monk, with all the woundings of the whip well salted by remorse.  As you have guessed, I had not yet summoned up the courage to tell him how I had staked his chance of happiness upon a casting of the die of fate—­staked and lost it.  Now that it was gone, I saw how I had missed the golden opportunity; how I had weakly hesitated when delay could only make the telling harder.

By tacit consent we never spoke of Margery.  Richard’s silence hung upon despair, I thought; and as for mine, since the husband’s road and the lover’s lay so far apart, I could not bring myself to speak of her.  But she was always first in my thoughts in that time of convalescence, as I made sure she was in his; and at the last the hidden thing between us was brought to light.

It was on a night some three weeks or more after my fever turn.  Our larder had run low again, and Jennifer had spent the earlier hours of the night abroad—­to little purpose, as it chanced.  ’Twas midnight or thereabouts when he came swearing in to tell me that the Tories were out again to harry our side of the river afresh, and to make a refugee’s begging of a bag of meal a thing of peril.

“They’ll starve us out in shortest measure at this rate,” he prophesied.  “They have trampled down all the standing corn for miles around, and this morning they burned the mill.  ’Tis our notice to quit, and we’d best take it.  There has been fighting to the south of us—­a plenty of it—­at Rocky Mount and Hanging Rock, and elsewhere, and every man is needed.  If you are strong enough to stand the march, we’ll run the gantlet down the river in the pirogue and cut across from the lower ford to join Major Davie or Mr. Gates.”