They, martyrs! Roundhead
traitors!"

"Madam," interrupted Landless with a curious smile upon his lips, "did
you not know that I was, that I am, what you call a Roundhead?"

"No," she said, "I did not know," and stood perfectly still, looking
straight before her down the long vista of trees. He saw her face change
and harden into the old expression of aversion. The slaves came up to
them, and Regulus asked if 'lil Missy wanted anything. "No, nothing at
all," she answered, and walked quietly onward.

Landless, an angry pain tugging at his heart, kept beside her, for they
were passing through a deep hollow in the wood where the gnarled and
protruding roots of cypress and juniper made walking difficult, and
where a strong hand was needed to push aside the wet and pendent masses
of vine. Regulus, fifty yards behind them, began to sing a familiar
broadside ballad, torturing the words out of all resemblance to English.
The rich notes rang sweetly through the forest. Down from the far summit
of a pine flashed a cardinal bird, piercing the gloom of the hollow like
a fire ball thrown into a cavern. Landless held aside a curtain of
glistening leaves that, mingled with purple clusters of fruit, hung
across their path. Patricia passed him, then turned impulsively. "You
think me hard!" she said. "Many people think me so, but I am not so,
indeed.... And there are good Puritans. Major Carrington, they say, is
Puritan at heart, and he is a good man and a gentleman.... And you saved
my life.... At least you are not like those men of whom I spoke. You
would not plot against the good peace which we enjoy! You would not try
to array servant against master?"

It was a direct question asked with large, straightforward eyes fixed
upon his. He tried to evade it, but she asked again with insistence, and
with a faint doubt lurking in her eyes, "If these men are plotting,
which God forbid! you know nothing of it? You have great wrongs, but you
would take no such dastard way to right them?"

Landless's soul writhed within him, but he told the inevitable lie that
was none the less a lie that it was also the truth. He said in a low
voice, "I trust, madam, that I will do naught that may misbecome a
gentleman."

She was quite satisfied. He saw that he had regained the ground lost by
his avowal of a few minutes before, and he cursed himself and cursed his
fate.

Soon afterwards they emerged from the forest upon a tobacco patch, from
the midst