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For Kate’s letter had had its desired effect. All her wrongdoings, her crowning outrage of his noble intentions, had been forgotten in the one little plaintive appeal she had managed to breathe in a minor wail throughout that treacherous letter, treacherous alike to her husband and to her lover.
Then for the first time he heard of Forrest’s plot to capture Nashville, and of Kate’s part in it, of her condemnation, and imprisonment as a spy, and how Fred had secured her pardon. Calhoun listened to the story in wonder. When it was finished, he exclaimed: “Why, Kate, you are a heroine! I am proud of you.”
Marcia suddenly saw herself standing there in Kate’s rightful place, Kate’s things in her hands, Kate’s garments upon her body, Kate’s husband held by her. It was as if Kate charged her with all these things, as she looked her through and over, from her slipper tips to the ruffle around the neck.
Old association held him, and wondering, fearful, not wholly glad to see it, he picked up the letter. It was an epistle of Kate’s, written in intimate style to Harry Temple and speaking of himself in terms of the utmost contempt. She even stooped to detail to Harry an account of her own triumph on that miserable morning when he had taken her in his arms and kissed her.
There she took refuge behind the great white curtains, and hid her face for several minutes, praying wildly, she hardly knew what, thankful she had been kept from the sight which yet she had longed to behold. As David turned to go up the steps and search for Marcia he was confronted by Kate’s beautiful, smiling face, radiant as it used to be when it had first charmed him.
Kate’s eyes were fixed upon him with their most bewitching, dancing smile of recognition, like a naughty little child who had been in hiding for a time and now peeps out laughing over the discomfiture of its elders. So Kate encountered the steadfast gaze of David’s astonished eyes. But there was no light of love in those eyes as she had expected to see.
He took her hand and looking at her for a moment, said, "Wilmot, Wilmot! Are you Dick’s sister?" Kate’s eyes filled with tears as she exclaimed, "Yes, sir, Richard was my brother." "Richard was your brother! Great Moses! What does this mean? And you in black and crying!"
Now he felt only disgust as some of the flippant sentences in her letters to Harry Temple came to his mind. His face was stern and unrecognizing. “David, you are angry with me yet! You said you would forgive!” The gentle reproach minimized the crime, and enlarged the punishment. It was Kate’s way.
She had given up every thing to help him and he had utterly forgotten her. He had promised to love, cherish, and protect her! That was another sin. He could not love and cherish her when his whole heart was another’s. Then he thought of Kate’s husband, that treacherous man who had stolen his bride and now gone away and left her sorrowing—left her without money, penniless in a strange city.
But he did not glance her way. How much or how little he had heard of Kate’s tirade, which in her passion had been keyed in a high voice, he never let them know and neither dared to ask him, lest perhaps he had not heard anything.
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