When I thereupon begged her leave to
depart, she first curtsied to me, and then, again with tears, came to
me and took my hand in hers. "I know that there is naught that I
can say. . . . Your wife loved you, sir, with all her heart." She drew
something from the bosom of her gown. "Would you like this? It is
a knot of ribbon that she wore. They found it caught in a bush at
the edge of the forest."
I took the ribbon from her and put it to my lips, then unknotted it
and tied it around my arm; and then, wearing my wife's colors, I
went softly out into the street, and turned my face toward the guest
house and the man whom I meant to kill.
CHAPTER XXXVII IN WHICH MY LORD AND I PART COMPANY
THE door of the guest house stood wide, and within the lower
room were neither men that drank nor men that gave to drink. Host
and drawers and chance guests alike had left pipe and tankard for
sword and musket, and were gone to fort or palisade or river bank.
I crossed the empty room and went up the creaking stairway. No
one met me or withstood me; only a pigeon perched upon the sill
of a sunny window whirred off into the blue. I glanced out of the
window as I passed it, and saw the silver river and the George and
the Esperance, with the gunners at the guns watching for Indian
canoes, and saw smoke rising from the forest on the southern
shore.
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