“John,” I whispered, grasping his hand hard, “I pray thee—­”

But he guessed my meaning.  “Nay, Harry,” he cried, “better this, for if I went back to our mother and told her that thou wert dead, after her long slight of thee and the long wrong we have all done thee, it would be a sorer fate for her than the stocks for thee.”

But I pleaded with him by the common blood in our veins to save me from this ignominy, and my fever increased, and he knew not how to quiet me.  Then in came Catherine Cavendish, and what she said had some weight with me.

“For shame!” she said, standing over me, with her face as white as death, but with resolution in her eyes, “for shame, Harry Wingfield!  Full easy it is to be brave on the battlefield, but it takes a hero to quail not when his vanity be assailed.  Have not as good men as thou, and better, sat in the stocks?  And think you that it will make any difference to us, except as we suffer with you?  And ’tis harder for my poor sister than for thee, but she makes no complaint, nor sheds a tear, but goes about with her face like the dead, and such a look in her eyes as never I saw there before.  And she told me to say to thee that she could not come to-day, but that she would make amends, and that thou hadst no cause to overworry, and I know not what she meant, but this much I do know, a brave man is a brave man whether it be the scaffold or the stocks, and—­and—­thou hast gotten thyself into a fever, Harry.”

With that she bade my brother John get some cool water from the jailer, and she bathed my head and arranged my bandages with that same skill which she had showed at the time when I was bruised by the mad horse, and my brother looked on as if only half pleased, yet full of pity.  And Catherine, as she bathed my head, told me how Major Beverly and Sir Humphrey were yet confined on shipboard, and Dick Barry was in the prison not far from me, and Nick and Ralph Drake were in hiding, but my Lord Estes was scot-free on account of his relationship to Governor Culpeper and had been to Drake Hill, but Mary would not see him.  And she said, furthermore, that her grandmother did not know that I was to be set in the stocks, and they dared not tell her, as she was grown so feeble since the riot—­at one time inveighing against me for my disloyalty, and saying that I should never have Mary, though I was cleared of my disgrace and no more a convict, and at another time weeping like a child over her poor Harry, who had already suffered so much and was now in prison.

Catherine in that way, which none but a woman hath, since it pertains both to love and authority, brought me to my senses, and I grew both brave and shamed at the same time, and yet after she had gone, never was anything like the sting of that ignominy which was prepared for me on the morrow.  Many a time had I seen men in the stocks, and passed them by with no ridicule, for that, it seemed to me, belonged to