“Tomorrow you will help me to remember a great many things,” he said.  “And now will you let me send you to bed, Mary Josephine?”

She was looking at the scar.  “And all those years I didn’t know,” she whispered.  “I didn’t know.  They told me you were dead, but I knew it was a lie.  It was Colonel Reppington—­” She saw something in his face that stopped her.

“Derry, don’t you remember?”

“I shall—­tomorrow.  But tonight I can see nothing and think of nothing but you.  Tomorrow—­”

She drew his head down swiftly and kissed the brand made by the heated barrel of the Englishman’s pistol.  “Yes, yes, we must go to bed now, Derry,” she cried quickly.  “You must not think too much.  Tonight it must just be of me.  Tomorrow everything will come out right, everything.  And now you may send me to bed.  Do you remember—­”

She caught herself, biting her lip to keep back the word.

“Tell me,” he urged.  “Do I remember what?”

“How you used to come in at the very last and tuck me in at night, Derry?  And how we used to whisper to ourselves there in the darkness, and at last you would kiss me good-night?  It was the kiss that always made me go to sleep.”

He nodded.  “Yes, I remember,” he said.

He led her to the spare room, and brought in her two travel-worn bags, and turned on the light.  It was a man’s room, but Mary Josephine stood for a moment surveying it with delight.

“It’s home, Derry, real home,” she whispered.

He did not explain to her that it was a borrowed home and that this was his first night in it.  Such unimportant details would rest until tomorrow.  He showed her the bath and its water system and then explained to Wallie that his sister was in the house and he would have to bunk in the kitchen.  At the last he knew what he was expected to do, what he must do.  He kissed Mary Josephine good night.  He kissed her twice.  And Mary Josephine kissed him and gave him a hug the like of which he had never experienced until this night.  It sent him back to the fire with blood that danced like a drunken man’s.

He turned the lights out and for an hour sat in the dying glow of the birch.  For the first time since he had come from Miriam Kirkstone’s he had the opportunity to think, and in thinking he found his brain crowded with cold and unemotional fact.  He saw his lie in all its naked immensity.  Yet he was not sorry that he had lied.  He had saved Conniston.  He had saved himself.  And he had saved Conniston’s sister, to love, to fight for, to protect.  It had not been a Judas lie but a lie with his heart and his soul and all the manhood in him behind it.  To have told the truth would have made him his own executioner, it would have betrayed the dead Englishman who had given to him his name and all that he possessed, and it would have dragged to a pitiless grief the heart of a girl for whom the