“We are, my own dear love.”
“Then you will let me speak as plainly to you as to my wife.”
“Just as plainly. Yes.”
“Well, then, the very day on which you were mustered in, when I recognized you, I asked myself with a shudder, Where will she eat? Where will she sleep? With whom will she associate? How will she maintain her sacred womanly reserve in this crowded camp, where four or five soldiers occupy a tent together? And then it was that I felt the strong impulse to give private information of your sex, and have you quietly mustered out; but as I said before, I reflected that I had no right to betray your secret, or restrain your free agency, and I resolved to let you go on your own way, but to protect you in it, and so I immediately selected you as my orderly, and assigned you a nook in my own quarters, where your woman’s holy privacy would be, and ever has been, inviolate.”
“Oh, Justin, dear love, honored husband, a thousand blessings on you for all your tender care,” she said, stooping and pressing her lips to his.
He put his arms around her, and she wept to feel how feeble those strong arms had become, and he fondly returned her caresses.
“Tell me, now, Justin,” she said, “how it happened that you never once betrayed to me your recognition of me?”
“I have great powers of reticence and self-control. I knew that to betray my knowledge of you would be to wound your delicacy and control your actions, and so I constantly guarded—”
“Hark!” exclaimed Britomarte, springing to her feet.
“What is it?” cried Justin.