“Yes,” I cried, “I see your meaning right well, and I would give my left hand at the wrist joint could any gate be opened through which in honor I might win to the miscreant's heart.” Now the General read the letter to himself; now he knitted his forehead into a snarl and brooded while over against him I sat fury-stung.
“Two matters we are to agree on,” said the General at last. “We are not to tell Peg.”
“No,” said I.
“Nor Eaton.”
Now, somehow, I in no fashion, not even the most shadowy, had had Eaton on my slope of thought. It had seemed, in the confusion of wrath into which this charge laid on poor Peg had stirred me, as though there were just three folk in interest for our own side, being the General and Peg and myself. The mention of Eaton struck on me in a strange, blistering way, and was as much an iron in my soul as the slanders of that infamous Ely himself. This came to be no more than a blur of my wits, however it departed in a blink, and then a feeling somewhat of pleasure succeeded to think Eaton would not be engaged in Peg's defence.
“Peg shall not know,” repeated the General, as he who goes over a manouvre in his mind, “Eaton shall not know. You and I will be enough; and Noah; and mayhap Henry Lee, since I think, Major, you are not the man to be trusted with a reply. You—like myself.—would overflow too much, since you own a feeling too deep.”
There was sense in what the General advanced; I was in an ill frame for cunning, and to be cool of quill with any specious or refutatory letter-writing. I could have indited nothing that would not run into a challenge with the first line; and, with the pulpit character of the foe to be our answer, that would have been as so much raving madness.
“Let us” said the General, again taking up the scrawl, “examine this precious scorpion's nest in detail, and then we may know best how it should be torn to pieces. This Ely does not make these charges by his own knowledge, but declares how he believes in their truth on the word of some 'extremely honest individual' of this town. This person would be so much the viper he must needs hide and crawl under cover; for this Ely also says 'who asks his name withheld.'”
By this time I had myself in recovery and began to take a part in the thinking.
“First, then,” said I, “is there any accusation carried which you, yourself, should contradict?”