“What is it, Jack?” he asked, gently.

“My sword!” I gasped.  “We should have been half-way there by this.  Yeates was misled.  ’Tis Falconnet she fears.  She was at bay—­hark you, at bay and fair desperate.  That word of hers to the baronet was her poor pitiful defiance built on her trust in us, and we have lain here—­”

He found the sword and thrust it into my hand, crying: 

“Come on!  You can strew the dust and ashes on me later.  You said you loved her the better, and I do believe it now, Jack!  You trusted her, as I did not.  We’ll fight as one man to cut her out of this coil, whatever it may be; and after that is done I’ll make my bow and leave you a fair field.”

“Nay, nay; that you shall not, Dick,” I began; but he was half-way through the narrow passage to the open, trailing the ancient broadsword and the bearskin from his bed; and I was fain to follow quickly, leaving the protest all unfinished.

XVIII

IN WHICH WE HEAR NEWS FROM THE SOUTH

As near as might be guessed, it wanted yet an hour or two of daybreak when we made a landing within the boundaries of Appleby Hundred, and beached and hid the pirogue in the bushes.

Of the down-stream flitting through the small hours of the warm midsummer night there is no sharp-etched picture on the memory page.  As I recall it, no spoken word of Jennifer’s or mine came in to break the rhythm of the hasting voyage.  Our paddles rose and fell, dipping and sweeping in unison as if we two, kneeling in bow and stern, were separate halves of some relentless mechanism driven by a single impulse.  Overhead the starlit dome circled solemnly to the right or left to match the windings of the stream.  On each hand the tree-fringed shores sped backward in the gloom; and beneath the light shell of poplar wood that barely kissed the ripples in passing, the river lapped and gurgled, chuckling weirdly at the paddle plungings, and swirling aft in the longer reaches to point at us down the lengthening wake with a wavering finger silver-tipped in the wan starlight.

With the canoe safely hidden at the landing place, which was some little distance from that oak grove where I had twice kept tryst with death, we set out for the manor house, skulking Indian fashion through the wood; and, when we reached the in-fields, looking momently to come upon a sentry.

Thinking the approaches from the road and river would be better guarded than that from the wood, we skirted a widespread thicket tangle, spared by my father twenty years before to be a grouse and pheasant cover, and fetching a compass of half a mile or more across the maize fields, came in among the oaks and hickories of the manor grounds.

Still there was no sight nor sound of any enemy; no light of candles at the house, or of camp-fires beneath the trees.

A little way within the grove, where the interlacing tree-tops made the darkness like Egyptian night, Jennifer went on all fours to feel around as if in search of something on the sward.  Whereat I called softly to know what he would be at.