lasped her to my breast."

Here Captain Brand looked as if the tiger had already sprung upon the
passer-by, and was sucking the blood, with his claws buried deep into
the carcass.

"'_Senor_,' she murmured, in the low, sweet, plaintive note of a
nightingale, 'I am a young and inexperienced girl, of an old and noble
family; you have saved my life; my mother is gone, and I have no one to
advise with, and, if my dear father smiles upon my choice, I will marry
you; but do not, I implore you, deceive me!'"

"And you did not deceive her, I hope?" broke in the doctor, with a
shiver of light from his determined eyes that was almost painful to see,
so earnest and terrible it was, as he leaned forward with both of his
clenched hands quivering nervously on the table.

Captain Brand looked at the doctor with rather a suspicious stare, and
letting his thumbs drop from his armpits till they rested on the flaps
of his waistcoat pockets, he replied, in a careless tone,

"Oh no, _monsieur_, I never deceived--a--that is to say, intentionally
deceived a woman in all my life!"

"Let us hear more, my son," said the priest, thickly, who had now woke
up from a short nap.

"_Bueno, caballeros!_" continued the narrator, as he tossed off a
thimbleful of maraschino from a wicker-bound square bottle after his
coffee. "Well, gentlemen, the young Portuguese damsel, Senorita
Lucia, and I sat there under the weather rail till the first faint
streaks of early dawn in the tropics began to announce the coming of
the gray morning. Then she arose, and, leaning with a soft pressure on
my arm, I took her to her cabin, kissed her sweet hands, and bade her
good-night."

At this stage of the narrative Captain Brand threw himself triumphantly
back in his large Manilla chair, and ran his white muscular hands
through his dry light hair. Ay! the tiger had clutched his prey. An
unprotected, young, and lovely girl had been won and lost, and her
palpitating heart was soon to be torn from her tender body.

CHAPTER XVI.

NUPTIALS OF THE GIRL WITH DARK EYES.

"With a pint and a quarter of holy water
He made the sacred sign,
And he dashed the whole on the only daughter
Of old Plantagenet's line!"

"But the count he felt the nervous work
No more than any polygamous Turk,
Or bold piratical skipper,
Who, during his buccaneering search,
Would as soon engage a 'hand' at church
As a hand on board his c