In moments of mental energy Philip was restless.  He rose from his chair now and moved softly back and forth across the carpeted floor of the big room, shrouded in tobacco smoke.  Should he break his word to Gregson and tell Brokaw of Lord Fitzhugh?  But, on second thought, what good would come of it?  Brokaw was already aware of the seriousness of the situation.  In some one of his unaccountable ways he had learned that their enemies were to strike almost immediately, and his own revelation of the Fitzhugh letters would but strengthen this evidence.  He would keep his faith with Gregson for the promised day or two.  For an hour the two men were alone in the room.  At the end of that time their plans were settled.  The next morning Philip would leave for Blind Indian Lake and prepare for war.  Brokaw would follow two or three days later.

A heavy weight seemed lifted from Philip’s shoulders when he left Brokaw.  After months of worry and weeks of physical inaction he saw his way clear for the first time.  And for the first time, too, something seemed to have come into his life that filled him with a strange exhilaration, and made him forgetful of the gloom that had settled over him during these last months.  That night he would see Jeanne.  His body thrilled at the thought, until for a time he forgot that he would also see and talk with Eileen.  A few days before he had told Gregson that it would be suicidal to fight the northerners; now he was eager for action, eager to begin and end the affair—­to win or lose.  If he had stopped to analyze the change in himself he would have found that the beautiful girl whom he had first seen on the moonlit rock was at the bottom of it.  And yet Jeanne was a northerner, one of those against whom his actions must be directed.  But he had confidence in himself, confidence in what that night would bring forth.  He was like one freed from a bondage that had oppressed him for a long time, and the fact that he might be compelled to fight Jeanne’s own people did not destroy his hopefulness, the new joy and excitement that he had found in life.  As he hurried back to his cabin he told himself that both Jeanne and Pierre had read what he had sent to them in the handkerchief; their response was a proof that they understood him, and deep down a voice kept telling him that if it came to fighting they three, Pierre, Jeanne, and himself, would rise or fall together.  A few hours had transformed him into Gregson’s old appreciation of the fighting man.  Long and tedious months of diplomacy, of political intrigue, of bribery and dishonest financiering, in which he had played but the part of a helpless machine, were gone.  Now he held the whip-hand; Brokaw had acknowledged his own surrender.  He was to fight—­a clean, fair fight on his part, and his blood leaped in every vein like marshaling armies.  That nights on the rock, he would reveal himself frankly to Pierre and Jeanne.  He would tell them of the plot to disrupt the company, and of the work ahead of him.  And after that—­