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"Shall we turn in here?" I asked. "Yes." She stooped low under the interlacing boughs and plunged with me into the double darkness. "Is this the conservatory?" playfully whispered Miss Rothvelt; and if a hot, damp air, motionless, and heavy with the sleeping breath of countless growths could make it so, a conservatory it was.
It's no great matter, merely a pass through our lines; but it's your ostensible business till you get there; understand?" I thought I did until I glanced at the superscription: Miss Coralie Rothvelt. "Now, here is another matter of much more importance." He showed, but retained, another envelope. "Behind the house where you're to find Miss Rothvelt there's a road into Cole's Creek bottom.
No doubt Coralie Rothvelt, by this time in Fayette, was telling some Federal commander that a certain Confederate courier, now asleep at the house of Lucius Oliver, had let slip to her the fact that his despatches were written to be captured, and that, read with that knowledge, they would be of guiding value.
"Nonsense!" muttered both men, and I liked them the better. "My dear Smith," said Miss Rothvelt, "keep your trust. But if I part here with these two kind gentlemen " "Who don't belong to Ferry's scouts at all," I still more sweetly added.
With a spasm of eagerness I said it did: "Our acquai' hh Gallatin hh " But my soul cried like a culprit, "No, no, it begins only now!" and my whole being stood under arrest before the accusing truth that from Gallatin till now my acquaintance had been solely with that false phase of her which I knew as Coralie Rothvelt.
When I first lay down, the cotton had so smelt of its newness that I thought it was enough, of itself, to keep me awake. Now this odor was veiled by another; a delicate perfume; a perfume I knew, and which brought again to me all the incidents of the night, and all their woe. I looked, and there, so close to the bedside that she could see my eyes as plainly as I saw hers, stood Coralie Rothvelt.
I came a sly step nearer, and lo! in his shadow, flattened against the house, face outward, was Coralie Rothvelt comically holding the forked stick at a present-arms. Throbbing with a grateful, craving allegiance, I seized the rein. Then I bent low out the window and with my free hand touched her face as it turned upward into a beam of moonlight.
With a whole world of other people's names to choose from, why have you borrowed Charlotte Oliver's? Have you come here determined to be sent to prison, Miss Coralie Rothvelt?" Charlotte did not move an eyelash. Gradually a happy confidence lighted her face. "Freedom or prison is to me a secondary question. I came here determined to use only the truth.
"I'm Miss Coralie Rothvelt," she added, and then how she sparkled in the dark as she said, "I see you remember me." "I am but human." "And yet you never take a lady's name for granted?" "I am to know Miss Rothvelt by finding her in a certain place." My honeyed bow implied that her being just now very much out of place was no fault of mine.
"Daring game that was you fellows let her put up on us night before last, my boy, and it hung by a thread. If our officers had only asked the old man his name it would have been a flash of light. If I had dreamed, when I saw you and Ned Ferry yesterday, that Coralie Rothvelt was Charlotte Oliver, and could have known her then as I've learned to know her to-day from her worst enemy, you know, "
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