m, provided that
they are allowed to have their own way."

"Ah!" I exclaimed, "you evidently do not know of what a ship's crew may
become capable when once they have committed so serious a crime as
piracy--for that is what they have done in taking this brig from me. It
is not what these men are, now, but what they may become in the future,
of which I am thinking, especially so far as you are concerned. I
recognise possibilities in the future that may make this brig the scene
of hourly peril to you of a nature that I shudder to think of, and it is
_your_ safety that I am concerned about; that assured, I could face the
rest with equanimity."

"Thank you. It is exceedingly good and kind of you to think so much for
me, and so little for yourself," answered my companion. She spoke with
her face turned away from me, so that I was unable to read its
expression, and her voice had an intonation that I would have given much
to have been able to translate. Was it merely my imagination--I asked
myself--or was there really a recurrent shade of her former hauteur of
manner, mingled with just the faintest suggestion of irony and
impatience? The fact is that I was at that moment as far from being
able to comprehend this lovely but inscrutable woman as when I met her
for the first time in the saloon of the _City of Cawnpore_: her moods
were as changeable as the weather: there were occasions when her manner
toward me was almost as warm and genial and sympathetic as even a lover
could require; while there were others when she appeared animated by a
set purpose to impress upon me the conviction that our remarkable
adventure together invested me with no claim whatever upon her beyond
that of the merest ordinary gratitude. As for me, if I have not already
allowed the fact to leak out, I may as well here make a clean breast of
it and confess that I loved her with all the ardent passion of which a
man's heart is capable, and I was resolutely determined to win her love
in return; but up to the moment of which I am now speaking I seemed to
have made so little headway that I often doubted whether I had made any
at all. I had, however, come at length to recognise that the rebuffs I
occasionally met with followed some speech or action of mine of which
the young lady did not wholly approve; and so I soon found it to be in
the present instance. She remained silent for perhaps half a minute
after speaking the words the recounting of which h