ildren. He saved my father's
life long, long ago, and helped to support my mother in her last years.
Would you have me to forget all this because men say that he is a
pirate?"

"Why, mother," cried Henry, "if you know so much about him you _must_
know that, whatever he was in time past, he is the pirate Durward now."

"I do _not_ know that he is the pirate Durward!" said the widow, in a
voice and with a look so decided that Henry was silenced and sorely
perplexed; yet much relieved, for he knew that his mother would rather
die than tell a deliberate falsehood.

The missionary was also comforted; for although his judgment told him
that the grounds of hope thus held out to him were very insufficient, he
was impressed by the thoroughly confident tone of the widow, and felt
relieved in spite of himself.

Soon after this conversation was concluded, the household retired to
rest.

Next morning Henry was awakened out of a deep sleep by the sound of
subdued voices in the room underneath his own. At first he paid no
attention to these, supposing that, as it was broad daylight, some of
their native servants were moving about. But presently the sound of his
mother's voice induced him to listen more attentively. Then a voice
replied, so low that he could with difficulty hear it at all. Its
strength increased, however, and at last it broke forth in deep bass
tones.

Henry sprang up and threw on his clothes. As he was thus engaged the
front door of the opened, and the speakers went out. A few seconds
sufficed for the youth to finish dressing him; then, seizing a pistol,
he hurried out of the house. Looking quickly round, he just caught sight
of the skirts of a woman's dress as they disappeared through the doorway
of a hut which had been formerly inhabited by a poor native, who had
subsisted on the widow's bounty until he died. The door was shut
immediately after.

Going swiftly but cautiously round by a back way, Henry approached the
hut. Strange and conflicting feelings filled his breast. A blush of deep
shame and self-abhorrence mantled on his cheek when it flashed across
him that he was about to play the spy on his own mother. But there was
no mistaking Gascoyne's voice.

How the supposed pirate had got there, and wherefore he was there, were
matters that he did not think of or care about at that moment. There he
was; so the young man resolved to secure him and hand him over to
justice.

Henry was too honorable to lis