hen we were washing down our evening meal of meat and
maize cake with plain cold water, I mourned the good wine idling in its
bin at Jennifer House. At that, without a word to me, he took the whole
night for a perilous adventure and fetched a dozen bottles of the
Jennifer port to make me choke and strangle at the thought of what its
bringing had cost in toil and hazard.

Another time I spoke of English beef, saying how it would rebuild a man
at need--how it had made the English soldier what he is. Whereupon, as
before, my loving forager took a hint where none was intended; was gone
the night long, and slaughtered me some Tory yearling,--'twas Mr.
Gilbert Stair's, I mistrusted, though Dick would never name the owner,
and so I had a sirloin to my breakfast.

In these and many other ways he spent himself freely for love of me. If
he had been a younger brother of my own blood the common parentage could
not have made him tenderer.

'Twas not the mere outgushing of a nature open-armed to make a bosom
friend of all the world; nor any feminine softness on his part. If I
have drawn him thus my pen is but a clumsy quill, for he was manly-rough
and masterful, with all the native strength and vigor of the
border-born.

But on the side of love and friendship no woman ever had a truer heart,
a keener eye or a lighter hand. And in a service for friend or mistress
he would spend himself as recklessly as those old knights you read about
who made a business of their chivalry.

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 ag