I did not dare to question her and we had gone some distance before she broke the silence. Then she told me, still looking straight before her and speaking with the same unnatural calm, that Lord Rawdon had respited the sentence for twenty-four hours to enable her to carry an appeal to Lord Cornwallis. But that he had not given her the smallest hope that the sentence would be altered. He had impressed this upon her almost harshly.
“But His Excellency is at Charles Town!” I protested, dumbfounded by this suggestion of the impossible. “You cannot go to Charles Town, and return in twenty-four hours!”
“He is at the Santee High Hills,” she answered. Her tone implied that she had known this and had not learned it from Lord Rawdon. Then in a dry hard voice she explained that she was to be allowed to see her father at three o’clock. She would start an hour later.
“For the High Hills?”
“Yes.”
“But you will die of fatigue,” I cried. “If you are to do this you must rest and eat.” I knew that she had ridden sixty miles in the last thirty-six hours and had done it under the stress of intense emotion.
She assented, saying meekly that she would do as I thought best. Then, as we entered, “You will come with me?” she said. And with that she turned to me, and looked at me with something of the old challenge in her eyes, looked as one not asking a favor, so much as demanding a right. Or, if the look did not mean that I was unable to say what it meant, beyond this, that it gave me a sort of shock. It was as if she had shown a different face for a moment. Had she known the truth, then she might have looked at me in such a fashion. But in that case she would not have asked me to go with her, I was sure of that.
Still the look was disturbing, and I hesitated. I reflected that her father would tell her the truth; that before four o’clock she would learn all. In the meantime, however, I could be of use to her, I could save her from some trials. And so “Certainly I will go,” I said, “if you wish it. If you still wish it, when the time comes.”
“Thank you,” she answered wearily. “I do wish it—and you owe us as much as that.”
“I owe you—”