“There was a cause, as you say,” I retorted. “There must have been, since I have fought and spilt blood on the other side. But I can tell you nothing to-night without forswearing myself more than I had to, to wear this coat you dislike so heartily. But I had a cause,” I repeated, going back to the beginning like a clock wound up to strike all its hours over again.
“You are bitter, Dick,” she said, and now she made no secret of her anxious sympathy. “You were always a hot-head, ready to quarrel and fight and take offense where none was meant. But I’ll do you the justice to say that heretofore you’ve always made reparation like a gentleman when your mad fit had passed. But now this dreadful thing is beyond repair—or is it?”
I could lie joyously enough to forward the enterprise which Mr. Hamilton had sent me on, but I could not lie to her who was the heart of my heart, even by implication.
“No,” I said; “it is not beyond repair.”
She caught eagerly at my reply.
“Then you have already repented of this rashest, most wretched passion-flight you ever made, Dick?—you have thought of—of going back to your—to Colonel—”
I laid a finger on my lips and slipped past her to see that the door in the passageway to the drawing-room was fully closed.
“What you are asking me to say would find me a rope very quickly if it came to other ears,” I cautioned, lowering my voice. Then in the same hurried half-whisper, and fearing every moment lest we should be interrupted: “What I have admitted thus far has been the truth in every word. But you must trust me, Beatrix; trust me in spite of everything. And you must not ask me to tell you more.”
“But you’ll promise me, Dick,—” she began.
There was the sound of a gently-closing door and steps in the passage—warnings she did not hear. Again there came that quick shuttling of the mind that covers all the moves of a desperate game in an eye-sweep that can not be measured for its lightning-like swiftness. She was a daughter of the Virginia Leighs, with a father and three brothers in the patriot army. I was a deserter and always to be suspected until I had actually drawn blood in the king’s service. For any of the Tory revelers to find us here together in cool converse.... I saw the shadow of the gibbet hanging plainly over me when I took her suddenly in my arms and stopped what might have been my death-warrant with a kiss on the sweet lips of pleading.