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private."
    "You're sure?" asked O'Connor, reluctant to go.
    Christopher nodded.
    Once O'Connor and Bryant were gone and the door closed, Vickers said, "The Superintendent told me my cousin Emily is paying us a visit."
    "So I've been told."
    "He advised me not to make trouble."
    "Why would you?"
    "I have every reason," said Vickers, the words sharp as knives. "Your father destroyed her good name."
    "My father?" Christopher barked a laugh. His ire was on the rise, and he fought to control it. "You need to get the facts straight. Your cousin pursued my father. He was a married man, and she knew it. By all accounts, she became obsessed with him after he killed her husband in a duel."
    "That's a dirty lie!" roared Vickers, fists clenched, face flush with scarlet anger.
    Christopher said nothing. This confrontation was teetering precariously on the brink of violence, and violence would mean disaster. Both of them would lose.
    Vickers shook a finger in his face. "I don't know why Emily would come all this way to see the likes of you. But whatever her reasons, I'm warning you, Groves, you had better treat her with respect. I will defend my family's honor."
    "If you've said what you came to say, get out."
    "You don't tell me what to do."
    "I said get out."
    "You're forgetting who I am."
    "Those stripes don't give you the right to remain in my quarters without my permission, unless you are conducting a formal inspection."
    "You're a coward," said Vickers, eyes narrowed into slits.
    He wants a fight
, realized Christopher,
and the devil take the cost. 'Never do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it.'
Napoleon's words came to Christopher's mind as he returned Vickers' stare.
    Without another word Christopher went to the door and opened it. O'Connor and Bryant were waiting just outside. They stepped into the room and watched Vickers, like a pair of trained guard dogs waiting hopefully for the word from Christopher that would loose them on the intruder.
    Vickers sneered. "Three to one. Are those odds good enough for a coward like you, Groves?"
    "He wouldn't need any help from us to teach you a few manners," said O'Connor.
    "One day, Groves," Vickers said as he left the room. "One day we will settle what's between us."
    Christopher shut the door on him.

Chapter 4
    William Cozzens, West Point's mess contractor, used the upper level of the two-story mess hall as a hotel. Ten rooms were available for friends and relatives who journeyed to the Academy to visit the cadets. It was here that Emily Cooper found lodging. But as it was not acceptable that her meeting with Christopher Groves occur in her hotel room, arrangements were made, through Superintendent Thayer, for Christopher to be excused from his afternoon academics to meet with her at Kosciusko's rock garden.
    The garden was near the cottage where Kosciusko had lived. A steep flight of stone steps descended from the ramparts down the wooded slope to the cottage near the river. The cottage was unoccupied now, but maintained by the Academy as a monument to one of the true heroes of the American Revolution.
    Christopher was a few minutes late. From the top of the rock garden he could see a frail figure dressed in somber black near the bottom of the steps, her back to him.
    Christopher hesitated. Adam Vickers' threat caused him less worry than Emily Cooper herself, for she had become a flesh-and-blood reminder of a past that Christopher was trying to overcome, if not escape. She was here because of his father, and her presence forced Christopher to confront his own mixed feelings about Jonathan Groves.
    She heard him as he came near, and turned, and for an instant Christopher was shot through with supernatural awe, nape hairs crawling, because she seemed ethereal rather than solid, spirit rather than living person, a ghost in black organdy and lace that might disintegrate before his very eyes, come here to haunt him. He told himself it was just the