“But, Harry,” she said, piteously, “I pray thee to go.”

I laughed and shook my head, and went away to my own quarters and sat down to my books, but, at something past midnight, Madam Cavendish sent for me in all haste.  She had gone to bed, and I was ushered to her bedroom, and when I saw her thin length of age scarce rounding the coverlids, and her face frilled with white lace, and her lean neck stretching up from her pillows with the piteous outreaching of a bird, a great tenderness of compassion for womanhood, both in youth and beauty and age and need, beyond which I can express, came over me.  It surely seems to me the part of man to deal gently with them at all times, even when we suffer through them, for there is about them a mystery of helplessness and misunderstanding of themselves which should give us an exceeding patience.  And it seems to me that, even in the cases of those women who are perhaps of greater wit and force of character than many a man, not one of them but hath her helplessness of sex in her heart, however concealed by her majesty of carriage.  So, when I saw Madam Cavendish, old and ill at ease in her mind because of me, and realised all at once how it was with her in spite of that clear head of hers and imperious way which had swayed to her will all about her for near eighty years, I went up to her, and, laying a gentle hand upon her head, laid it back upon the pillow, and touched her poor forehead, wrinkled with the cares and troubles of so many years, and felt all the pity in me uppermost. “’Tis near midnight, and you have not slept, madam,” I said.  “I pray you not to fret any longer about that which we can none of us mend, and which is but to be borne as the will of the Lord.”

“Nay, nay, Harry,” she cried out, with a pitiful strength of anger.  “I doubt if it be the will of the Lord.  I doubt if it be not the devil—­Catherine, Catherine—­Harry, my brain reels when I think that she should have done it—­a paltry ring, and to let you—­”

“It may be that she had not her wits,” I said.  “Such things have been, I have heard, and especially in the case of a woman with jewels.  It may be that she knew not what she did, and in any case I pray you to think no more of it, dear madam.”  And all the time I spoke I was smoothing her old forehead under the flapping frills of her cap.

One black woman was there in the room, sitting in the shadow of the bed-curtains, fast asleep and making a strange purring noise like a cat as she slept.

Suddenly Madam Cavendish clutched hard at my hand.  “Harry,” she said, “I sent for you because I have lain here fretting lest Mary and Catherine get not home in safety with only the black people to guard them.  I fear lest the Indians may be lurking about.”

“Dear Madam Cavendish,” I said, “you know that we stand in no more danger from the Indians.”

“Nay,” she persisted, “we can never tell what plans may be brewing in such savage brains.  I pray thee, Harry, ride to meet them and see if they be safe.”