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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
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