I felt her eyes upon me as I spoke, and turned to find them full of tearful pleading. "Oh, tell the truth!" she whispered. "Don't you see? He has the letter!"
I looked, and sure enough he held it in his hand; and then I understood the flash of irony in the sloe-black eyes of him.
"You lie clumsily, Captain Ireton, though it is a gentlemanly lie and does you honor. But we have trapped you fairly and you may as well make a clean breast of it. Your mistress knew very well what you would have her do, and since she is your mistress, went to do it."
While he was speaking I had a thought white-hot from some forge-fire of inspiration—a thought to tip an arrow of conviction and set it quivering in the mark. I would not stop to measure it; to look aside at her or any other lest one brief glance apart should send the arrow wavering from its course. So I looked the colonel boldly in the eye and drew the bow and sped the shaft.
"You think no other than a mistress would have done this, Colonel Tarleton—that it was done for love? Well, so it was; but with the love there went a duty."
"A duty, say you? How is that?"
I bowed as best I might, being so tightly bound; then fixed his eye again.
"You had forgot that honor is not wholly dead, sir. This lady is my wife."