ut, after a short pause.
"There are _two_ Demoiselles de Savenaye, Jack; which is it?"

Captain Jack halted, turned on his heels, and exclaimed
enthusiastically: "To me there is but one--one woman in the
world--Madeleine!" His look met that of Sir Adrian in full, and even
in the midst of his own self-centred mood he could not fail to notice
the transient gleam that shot in the elder's eyes, and the sudden
relaxation of his features. He pondered for a moment or two, scanning
the while the countenance of the recluse; then a smile lighted up his
own bronzed face in a very sweet and winning way. "As her kinsman,
have I your approval?" he asked and proceeded earnestly: "To tell the
truth at once, I was looking to even more than your approval--to your
support."

Sir Adrian's mood had undergone a change: as a breeze sweeping from a
new quarter clears in a moment a darkening mist from the face of the
earth, Captain Jack's answer had blown away for the nonce the
atmosphere of misgiving that enveloped him. He answered promptly, and
with warmth: "Being your friend, I am glad to know of this; being her
kinsman, I may add, my dear _Hubert_"--there was just a tinge of
hesitation, followed by a certain emphasis, on the change of name--"I
promise to support you in your hopes, in so far as I have any
influence; for power or right over my cousin I have none."

The sailor threw himself down once more in his arm-chair; and, tapping
his shining hessians with the stem of his long clay in smiling
abstraction, began, with all a lover's egotism, to expatiate on the
theme that filled his heart.

"It is a singular, an admirable, a never sufficiently-to-be-praised
conjunction of affairs which has ultimately brought me near you when I
was pursuing the Light o' my Heart, ruthlessly snatched away by a
cunning and implacable dragon, known to you as Miss O'Donoghue. I say
_dragon_ in courtesy; I called her by better names before I realised
what a service she was unconsciously rendering us by this sudden
removal."

"Known to me!" laughed Sir Adrian. "My own mother's sister!"

"Then I still further retract. Moreover, seeing how things have turned
out, I must now regard her as an angel in disguise. Don't look so
surprised! Has she not brought my love under your protection? I
thought I was tolerably proof against the little god, but then he had
never shot his arrows at me from between the long lashes of Madeleine
de Savenaye. Oh, those eyes, Adrian