The woman who had come in with Smith laughed. "That might answer," she said, "if his sweetheart were not here. Do you think she would leave him to starve?"
There was a general stir and muttering as the men turned to the girl. "Pooh," said one, "it is Ferguson's girl."
"And your spy's sweetheart," the woman repeated.
The girl lifted her head and showed the room a face pale, weary, and dull-eyed. "He is nothing to me," she said.
And the men would have believed her; but the woman, with a swift, cat-like movement, seized her wrist and held it. "Nothing to you, my girl, isn't he?" she cried. "Then you have the fever or the small-pox on you! One, two, three----"
Her face flaming, the girl sprang up and snatched away her hand.
The woman laughed--and how I hated her! "He is nothing to you, isn't he?" she said in a mocking tone. "Yet what will you not give me to save him, my chick? What will you not give me to see him safe out of this house? What----?"
"Peace, peace!" cried Charnock. "Time is everything, and we are wasting it. Unless we would be taken, every man of us, we should be half-way to Romney Marsh by morning."
"Will you leave him to me!" said Smith suddenly.
"Leave him?"