"And the soldiers came up, and the officer called out, 'Give up your traitor husband!' and Margaret stood still and calm."
"'He is no traitor, but loyal and true.'"
"Then they searched the house, but couldn't find him. 'We shall stay here till we do,' said the officer, 'and you, madam, shall be our prisoner.' So they lived in the house and guarded her night and day."
"But her doves flew in and out of the window, and under their wings they carried messages that she wrote to her husband and he wrote to her, and she sent nearly all her food to her husband by them, too. And she got thin and ill, for she wasn't having enough food. Then one day, they called her out of her room, and said she must tell them where her husband was, or they would burn the house down over her head. She looked at them and said, 'I could no more be a traitor to my husband than my husband could be to his king.'"
"So they locked her in the house and set fire to it. But Margaret looked up to God, and asked Him to help her, and He sent a storm and the rain put the fire out, and Margaret never came out of the house, and the soldiers thought she and her husband were starved to death. But they weren't, for Margaret went into the secret room, and took her husband along an underground passage, into the pine-woods, and they crossed the sea until it was safe for them to come back again. There, wasn't she a brave woman?"
"She was," said Jean warmly. "That's a very nice story, Sunnie, only I think she had the easiest part to play."
"Why?" asked the doctor.
"Think of her husband shut up in that secret room. How could he stand it? I would rather have died than been imprisoned! It is not a man's part to play—that of hiding and letting a woman bear the brunt of his enemies' anger. I don't admire him for it; one pities him, that is all!"
"Have you ever been imprisoned? You speak so emphatically on the subject."
"Yes," said Jean with warmth. "For two years after I left school, I was shut up in an old house with a grandfather who tried to crush the life out of me."