yes,
'tis a strain...." He paused, still wiping his face, then went on:
"_And_ I swear that when I sees them men sit there in that black pew,
an' hev heard the hammers going clack, clack on the scaffolding outside,
and knew that they hadn't no more chance than you have to get out of
there..." He pointed his short thumb towards the handkerchief of an
opening, where the little blurr of blue light wavered through the two
iron frames crossed in the nine feet of well. "Lord, you _never_ gets
used to it. You _wants_ them to escape; 'tis in the air through the
whole prison, even the debtors. I tells myself again and again, 'You're
a fool for your pains.' But it's the same with the others--my mates. You
can't get it out of your mind. That little kid now. I've seen children
swing; but that little kid--as sure to swing as what... as what _you_
are...."

"You think I am going to swing?" I asked.

I didn't want to kill him any more; I wanted too much to hear him
talk. I hadn't heard anything for months and months of solitude, of
darkness--on board the admiral's ship, stranded in the guardship at
Plymouth, bumping round the coast, and now here in Newgate. And it had
been darkness all the time. Jove! That Cuban time, with its movements,
its pettiness, its intrigue, its warmth, even its villainies showed
plainly enough in the chill of that blackness. It had been romance, that
life.

Little, and far away, and irrevocably done with, it showed all golden.
There wasn't any romance where I lay then; and there had been irons on
my wrists; gruff hatred, the darkness, and always despair.

On board the flagship coming home I had been chained down in the
cable-tier--a place where I could feel every straining of the great
ship. Once these had risen to a pandemonium, a frightful tumult. There
was a great gale outside. A sailor came down with a lanthorn, and tossed
my biscuit to me.

"You d------d pirate," he said, "maybe it's you saving us from
drowning."

"Is the gale very bad?" I had called.

He muttered--and the fact that he spoke to me at all showed how great
the strain of the weather must have been to wring any words out of him:

"Bad--there's a large Indiaman gone. We saw her one minute and then..."
He went away, muttering.

And suddenly the thought had come to me. What if the Indiaman were the
_Lion_--the _Lion_ with Seraphina on board? The man would not speak to
me when he came again. No one would speak to me; I was a pirate w