She would let no
falsehood, no craven feminine subterfuge intervene between them.

"Do not thank me," she exclaimed, glowing with a brilliant scorn in
which the greatness of her beauty, all worn as she was, struck him
into surprise, yet evoked no spark of admiration. "What I did I did,
to gratify myself. Oh, aye, if I were as other women I should smile
and take your compliments, and pose as the martyr and as the
self-sacrificing devoted sister. But I will not. It was nothing to me
how Madeleine got in or out of her love scrapes. I would not have gone
one step to help her break her promise to you, or even to save your
life, but that it pleased me so to do. Madeleine has never chosen to
make me her confidant. I would have let her manage her own affairs
gaily, had I had better things to occupy my mind--but I had not,
Captain Smith. Life at Pulwick is monotonous. I have roaming blood in
my veins: the adventure tempted, amused me, fascinated me--and there
you have the truth! Of course I could have given the letter to the men
and sent them back to you with it--it was not because of my promise
that I did not do it. Of course I could have spoken the instant I got
on board, perhaps----" here a flood of colour dyed her face with a
gorgeous conscious crimson, and a dimple faintly came and went at the
corner of her mouth, "perhaps I would have spoken. But then, you must
remember, you closed my lips!"

"My God!" said Captain Jack, and looked at her with a sort of horror.

But this she could not see for her eyes were downcast. "And now that I
have come," she went on, and would have added, "I am glad I did," but
that all of a sudden a new bashfulness came upon her, and she
stammered instead, incoherently: "As for Adrian--Rene knew I had a
message for you, and Rene will tell him--he is not stupid--you
know--Rene, I mean."

"I am glad," answered the man gravely, after a pause, "if you have
reasonable grounds for believing that your husband knows you to be on
my ship. He will then be the less anxious at your disappearance: for
he knows too, madam, that his wife will be as honoured and as guarded
in my charge as she would be in her mother's house."

He bowed again in a stately way and then immediately left her.

Molly sank back upon her couch, and she could not have said why, burst
into tears. She felt cold now, and broken, and her stiffening wound
pained her. But nevertheless, as she lay upon the little velvet
pillow, and wept her