you,
or marry you, or anything important of that sort. All I promise is to be
so grateful, so glad, that--who knows how I may feel to you afterward?
And anyhow, I'll let you kiss me, this very night--on my cheek."

"You will? Yet--you say you're not bribing me! You couldn't offer me a
much bigger bribe. Why, Peggy, I'd be happy just to die--after getting a
kiss from you--even on your cheek!" and he laughed at himself forlornly.

"You're a dear boy, Tony," I said, crushed with remorse. "The kiss won't
be a bribe, either. It will be a token of--of--I hardly know what. But
partly of gratitude, the deepest gratitude, if you can trust me enough
to believe I'll be true."

"I do believe that, indeed I do believe it, forever. And--and--by Jove!
I _will_ tell you," he broke out, with a kind of breathless gasp.
"You're too strong for me, Peggy. You've _got_ me! But after all,
there's no such great harm in telling, now. It's different from last
night. Then I didn't know--nobody knew, I suppose--what the upshot of
certain things might be. As it's turned out, some of the story will have
to be known. Not all--but the part you want to know most."

"Tell me that," I pleaded.

"You swear you'll never breathe anything I say to you?"

"I swear I never will, until you give me leave."

"Well, then, those three explosions you heard last night weren't
explosions at all. _They were shots from our field guns._ But I'll tell
you what happened exactly--both sides of the story."

"Both sides? How is it there are two?"

"Well, there's March's side, and----"

"And--what other one?"

"And Major Vandyke's side."

"I knew it!" I cried out sharply. "I knew that man would try to ruin
Eagle. I should like to shoot him with one of those very guns."

"Peggy, you mustn't talk like that," Tony warned me. "If you do, I can't
go on."

"Forgive me," I said, and let him hold my hand, happy for a moment in
the belief that he was soothing me.

"You know--you've heard, I guess, that Vandyke was in command last
night, because the colonel had a touch of the sun? But that isn't the
right way to begin my story. I'm hanged if I know how to begin it! We
were up there on the hill with the guns, on guard; I mean I was, and the
men. And March came along, and strolled off again a little way with his
field glasses. Maybe thirty or forty yards distant, he was. I wasn't
noticing anything--felt rather sleepy, and was trying all I knew to keep
awake. I was in c