nstantly slipped them back under the coverlet again.
Brant did not speak, but with folded arms stood gazing upon her. And it
was her voice that first broke the silence.

"You have recognized me? Well, I suppose you know all," she said, with a
weak half-defiance.

He bowed his head. He felt as yet he could not trust his voice, and
envied her her own.

"I may sit up, mayn't I?" She managed, by sheer force of will, to
struggle to a sitting posture. Then, as the coverlet slipped from the
bare shoulder, she said, as she drew it, with a shiver of disgust,
around her again,--

"I forgot that you strip women, you Northern soldiers! But I forgot,
too," she added, with a sarcastic smile, "that you are also my husband,
and I am in your room."

The contemptuous significance of her speech dispelled the last lingering
remnant of Brant's dream. In a voice as dry as her own, he said,--

"I am afraid you will now have to remember only that I am a Northern
general, and you a Southern spy."

"So be it," she said gravely. Then impulsively, "But I have not spied on
YOU."

Yet, the next moment, she bit her lips as if the expression had
unwittingly escaped her; and with a reckless shrug of her shoulders she
lay back on her pillow.

"It matters not," said Brant coldly. "You have used this house and those
within it to forward your designs. It is not your fault that you found
nothing in the dispatch-box you opened."

She stared at him quickly; then shrugged her shoulders again.

"I might have known she was false to me," she said bitterly, "and that
you would wheedle her soul away as you have others. Well, she betrayed
me! For what?"

A flush passed over Brant's face. But with an effort he contained
himself.

"It was the flower that betrayed you! The flower whose red dust fell in
the box when you opened it on the desk by the window in yonder room--the
flower that stood in the window as a signal--the flower I myself
removed, and so spoiled the miserable plot that your friends concocted."

A look of mingled terror and awe came into her face.

"YOU changed the signal!" she repeated dazedly; then, in a lower
voice, "that accounts for it all!" But the next moment she turned
again fiercely upon him. "And you mean to tell me that she didn't help
you--that she didn't sell me--your wife--to you for--for what was it? A
look--a kiss!"

"I mean to say that she did not know the signal was changed, and that
she herself restored it to its