"How lovely is the night," she said with tender persuasiveness. "Come with me."
The man looked around him hastily. Every moment was precious to him. Did Miss Varney know. If so, what did she know? What was to be gained or lost by half an hour's delay on his part? He drew out his watch and glanced at it swiftly. There was time. He would never see her again. He might say he would possibly never see any one again after the hazards of this night. He was entitled to one brief moment of happiness. How long had she said? Half an hour. He would take it.
"Aren't you coming, Captain Thorne?" cried the girl from the porch, all the coquettish witchery of youth and the South in her voice.
"I am coming," answered the officer, deliberately stepping through the window, "for just half an hour," he added.
"That will be time enough," replied the girl, laughing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Half an hour is a short or a long time, depending upon the individual mood or the exigencies of the moment. It was a short half hour to Captain Thorne--to continue to give him the name by which he was commonly known--out in the moonlight and the rose garden with Edith Varney. It was short to him because he loved her and because he realised that in that brief space must be packed experience enough to last him into the long future, it might be into the eternal future!
It was short to Edith Varney, in part at least for the same reason, but it was shorter to him than to her, for at the end of that period the guilt or innocence of the man she loved and who loved her would be established beyond peradventure; either he was the brave, devoted, self-sacrificing Confederate soldier she thought him, or he was a spy; and since he came of a Virginia family, although West Virginia had separated from the Old Dominion, she coupled the word spy with that of traitor. Either or both would be enough to condemn him. Fighting against suspicion, she would fain have postponed the moment of revelation, of decision, therefore too quickly passed the flying moments.
It was a short half hour to Thorne, because he might see her no more. It was a short half hour again to Edith because she might see him no more, and it might be possible that she could not even allow herself to dream upon him in his absence in the future. The recollection of the woman would ever be sweet and sacred to the man, but it might be necessary for the woman to blot out utterly the remembrance of the man.