I was watching her intently as he spoke. 'Twas now hard upon two months since I had seen her last in that fateful upper room at Appleby Hundred, and the interval—or mayhap it was only the hardships and distresses of the captive flight—had changed her woefully. Yet now, as when we had stood together at the bar of Colonel Tarleton's court, I saw her pass from mood to mood in the turning of a leaf, her natural terror slipping from her like a cast-off garment, and a sweet dignity coming to clothe her in a queenlier robe, making her, as I would think, more beautiful than ever.
"I thank you, Sir Francis—for myself and for poor Jeanne," she said. "You have come to take us back to my father?"
He bowed again and spread his hands as a friend willing but helpless.
"Upon my honor, my dear lady, nothing would give me greater pleasure. But what can I say? We are upon the king's business, as you well know, and our mission will not brook an hour's delay—indeed, we are here only by the good chance which led your captors to choose our route for theirs. I have no alternative but to take you and your woman with us to the west; but I do assure you—"
She stopped him with an impassioned gesture of dissent, and darting a despairing glance around that minded me of some poor hunted thing hopelessly enmeshed in the net of the fowler, she clasped her hands and wrung them, breaking down piteously at the last, and begging him by all that men hold sacred to send her and her maid back to her father, if only with a single soldier for a guard.
'Twas then we had to drag my dear lad down and hold him fast, else he had flung himself into the torrent in some mad endeavor to spend his life for her. So I know not in what false phrase the baronet refused her, but when I looked again she was no longer pleading as his suppliant; she was standing before him in the martyr steadfastness of a true, clean-hearted woman at bay.
"Then you will not by so much undo the wrong you have done me, Captain Falconnet?" she said.
"A wrong? How then; do you call it a wrong to rescue you from these brutal savages, Mistress Margery?"
She took a step nearer, and though the dry-stick blaze was dying down and I could no longer see her face distinctly, I knew well how the scornful eyes were whipping him.
"Listen!" she said. "When you set Tallachama and his braves upon us in the road that night, you were not cautious enough, Captain Falconnet. I saw and heard you. More than that, Tallachama and the others have spoken freely of your plans in their own tongue, not knowing that my poor Jeanne had been three years a captive among the Telliquos."