With his daily offerings of unselfishness to shame me, you may be sure
that I was flayed alive; self-flogged like a miserable monk, with all
the woundings of the whip well salted by remorse. As you have guessed,
I had not yet summoned up the courage to tell him how I had staked his
chance of happiness upon a casting of the die of fate--staked and lost
it. Now that it was gone, I saw how I had missed the golden opportunity;
how I had weakly hesitated when delay could only make the telling
harder.

By tacit consent we never spoke of Margery. Richard's silence hung upon
despair, I thought; and as for mine, since the husband's road and the
lover's lay so far apart, I could not bring myself to speak of her. But
she was always first in my thoughts in that time of convalescence, as I
made sure she was in his; and at the last the hidden thing between us
was brought to light.

It was on a night some three weeks or more after my fever turn. Our
larder had run low again, and Jennifer had spent the earlier hours of
the night abroad--to little purpose, as it chanced. 'Twas midnight or
thereabouts when he came swearing in to tell me that the Tories were out
again to harry our side of the river afresh, and to make a refugee's
begging of a bag of meal a thing of peril.

"They'll starve us out in shortest measure at this rate," he prophesied.
"They have trampled down all the standing corn for miles around, and
this morning they burned the mill. 'Tis our notice to quit, and we'd
best take it. There has been fighting to the south of us--a plenty of
it--at Rocky Mount and Hanging Rock, and elsewhere, and every man is
needed. If you are strong enough to stand the march, we'll run the
gantlet down the river in the pirogue and cut across from the lower ford