to impinge upon his chronicle. "They were," he
says, "ever an impetuous, short-reasoning folk, honest and upright
enough so far as their judgment carried them, but hampered by a lack of
penetration in that judgment."

Sir John, as much in his earlier commerce with the Tressilians as in
this pregnant hour, certainly appears to justify his lordship of that
criticism. There were a score of questions a man of perspicuity would
not have asked, not one of which appears to have occurred to the knight
of Arwenack. If anything arrested him upon the cabin's threshold,
delayed him in the execution of the thing he had resolved upon, no doubt
it was sheer curiosity as to what further extravagances Rosamund might
yet have it in her mind to utter.

"This man has suffered," she told him, and was not put off by the hard
laugh with which he mocked that statement. "God alone knows what he has
suffered in body and in soul for sins which he never committed. Much
of that suffering came to him through me. I know to-day that he did not
murder Peter. I know that but for a disloyal act of mine he would be in
a position incontestably to prove it without the aid of any man. I know
that he was carried off, kidnapped before ever he could clear himself of
the accusation, and that as a consequence no life remained him but the
life of a renegade which he chose. Mine was the chief fault. And I must
make amends. Spare him to me! If you love me...."

But he had heard enough. His sallow face was flushed to a flaming
purple.

"Not another word!" he blazed at her. "It is because I do love you--love
and pity you from my heart--that I will not listen. It seems I must save
you not only from that knave, but from yourself. I were false to my duty
by you, false to your dead father and murdered brother else. Anon, you
shall thank me, Rosamund." And again he turned to depart.

"Thank you?" she cried in a ringing voice. "I shall curse you. All my
life I shall loathe and hate you, holding you in horror for a murderer
if you do this thing. You fool! Can you not see? You fool!"

He recoiled. Being a man of position and importance, quick, fearless,
and vindictive of temperament--and also, it would seem, extremely
fortunate--it had never happened to him in all his life to be so
uncompromisingly and frankly judged. She was by no means the first to
account him a fool, but she was certainly the first to call him one to
his face; and whilst to the general it might have