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So we two stood alone together as we had stood before; but now my lady's
eyes were downcast, and her lips and cheeks were pale. Yet she was more
beautiful than I had ever seen her--so beautiful that I would swear
the sum of all the precious gifts in God's great universe might be
expressed for me in this; that I might die to save her from this shame
and agony.

When my guards had thrust me forward, the colonel made short work of our
fresh offense.

"'Twas a dastard's trick, my Captain--this tangling of the lady in your
treason," he began. "How did you get your speech with her?"

"That is none of your affair, Colonel Tarleton," I retorted boldly,
thinking that with such a man the shortest word were ever the best. "Yet
I may say that the lady knew not what she did, nor why. As for my
getting speech with her, she was not any way to blame. I tampered with
your sentry."

"By God, you lie!" was his comment on this. "She might have tampered
with the guard and so got leave to keep a midnight tryst with you, but
not you." And then to my poor frighted love: "Have you no shame,
Mistress Margery Stair?"

Now I have said that she was changeful as any child or April sky, but
never had I seen her pass from mood to mood as she did then. One moment
she stood a woman tremulous and tearful as any woman caught in desperate
deed; the next she became a goddess vilified, and if her look had been a