Then I, not knowing her fully, and fearing lest I disquiet her, answered evasively somewhat about hunting and Sir Humphrey.  Some reply of that tenor was necessary, as I was, beside my knife for the tobacco cutting, armed to the teeth and booted to my middle.  But there was no deceiving Mary Cavendish.  She seized both my hands, and I trow for the minute, in that brave maiden soul of hers, the selfishness of our love passed as well as with me.

“I pray thee, Harry, cut down the tobacco on Laurel Creek first,” she whispered, “as I would, were I a man.  Oh!  I would I were a man!  Harry, promise me that thou wilt cut down first the tobacco on my plantation of Laurel Creek.”

But I had made up my mind to touch neither that nor the tobacco on Drake Hill, lest in some way the women of the Cavendish family be implicated.

“There be enough, and more than enough, for to-night,” I answered, and would have passed, but she would not let me.

“Harry,” she cried, so loud that I feared for listening ears, “if you cut not down my tobacco, then will I myself!  Harry, promise me!”

No love nor fear for me was in her eyes as she looked at me, only that enthusiasm for the cause of liberty, and I loved her better for it, if that could be.  A man or woman who is but a bond slave to love and incapable of aught but the longing for it, is but a poor lover.

“I tell thee, Harry, cut down the plants on Laurel Creek!” she cried again, and I answered to appease her, not daring violent contradiction lest I rouse her to some desperate act, this wild, young maid with Nathaniel Bacon’s hair in the locket against her heart, and as fiery blood as his in her veins, that it should come in good time, but that I was under the leadership of others and not my own.

“Then as soon as may be, Harry,” she persisted, “for sure I should die of shame were my plants standing and the others cut, and Harry, sure it could not be at all, were it not for my fine gowns which the ‘Golden Horn’ brought over from England!”

With that she laughed, and stood aside to let me pass, but suddenly, as I touched her in the narrow way, her mood changed, and the woman in her came uppermost, though not to her shaking.  But she caught hold of my right arm with her two little hands and pressed her fair cheek against my shoulder with that modest boldness of a maid when she is assured of love, and whispered:  “Harry, if the militia is ordered out they say they will not fire, but—­if thou be wounded, Harry, ’tis I will nurse thee, and no other, and—­Harry, cut all the plants that thou art able, before they come.”

Then she let me go, and I went forth thinking that here was a helpmeet for a soldier in such times as these, and how I gloried in her because she held her love as one with glory.  Round to the stable for my horse I stole, and it was very dark, with a soft smother of darkness because of a heavy mist, and the moon not up, and I had backed my horse out of his stall and was about to mount him, before I was aware of a dark figure lurking in shadow, and made out by the long sweep of the garments that it was a woman.  I paused, and looked intently into the shadow, where she stood so silently that she might have deceived me had it not been for a flutter of her cloak in a stray wind.