For you are betrayed and ruined--cut off and surrounded! It has been helped on by me, but I swear to you the blow did not come from MY hand.

I would have saved you.

God only knows how it happened--it was Fate!" In an instant Brant saw the whole truth instinctively and clearly.

But with the revelation came the usual calmness and perfect self-possession which never yet had failed him in any emergency.

With the sound of the increasing cannonade and its shifting position made clearer to his ears, the view of his whole threatened position spread out like a map before his eyes, the swift calculation of the time his men could hold the ridge in his mind--even a hurried estimate of the precious moments he could give to the wretched woman before him--he even then, gravely and gently, led her to a chair and said in a calm voice,-- "That is not enough! Speak slowly, plainly.