Under Fire: A Tale of the Shenandoah Valley — page 213: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

206 NED BRIGHT AGAIN APPEARS. ‘“T believe you, Captain Chetwood, and—I am not | angry with you for the deed, as you seem to fear.’’ espertha t”” ‘“There—there, lie still. You must not excite your- self.?? She laid her soft hand Hendeds on his forehead. ‘You think my actions strange. You wonder why I take the colonel’s death so calmly. The man who ‘was to have been my husband. Lie quiet and I'll ex- plain all to you. Then you will understand.”’ She looked at him strangely, and, smoothing back the hair from his forehead, continued: “Although Colonel Trafton was my betrothed, I am confident he never loved me as a woman expects to be loved. The vail fell from my eyes the day he attempted the life of ycur friend. He then stood be- fore me in a new and evil light. A man capable of perpetrating any crime to achieve an unhallowed purpose. My visit here at Uncle Orvin’s gave me the - opportunity to discover the real character of my promised husband. Moses Bluff told me all. How the colonel deceived his sister, and when that unfor- tunate woman followed him to Charleston on the eve of the war, how her death was compassed by the con- _ spiracy of her betrayer and another man as bad as himself. I know how you, Royal, tried to save that poor girl—and the mystery of that shooting ‘affair on the old stone turnpike in which you figured in the papers at the time, is plain to me at last. I am also fully informed about his attempts upon your life of late. How to cover his vindictive ptrrpose he tried to brand you asaspy. Do you wonder any longer that » his memory has no sorrow in it for me? ‘That I have ceased to regard him in any other light than that of a man whom it were a charity to forget ?”? Royal clasped the girl’s unresisting hand, and after a pause raised it Une HeOkey to nis lips. Gomichooks.co