n they made up
a monstrous passion.

Thief and pirate!

That was what she deemed him, without qualification, oblivious of
the deep wrongs he had suffered, the desperate case in which he found
himself after his escape from Barbados, and all the rest that had gone
to make him what he was. That he should have conducted his filibustering
with hands as clean as were possible to a man engaged in such
undertakings had also not occurred to her as a charitable thought with
which to mitigate her judgment of a man she had once esteemed. She had
no charity for him, no mercy. She had summed him up, convicted him and
sentenced him in that one phrase. He was thief and pirate in her eyes;
nothing more, nothing less. What, then, was she? What are those who have
no charity? he asked the stars.

Well, as she had shaped him hitherto, so let her shape him now. Thief
and pirate she had branded him. She should be justified. Thief and
pirate should he prove henceforth; no more nor less; as bowelless, as
remorseless, as all those others who had deserved those names. He would
cast out the maudlin ideals by which he had sought to steer a course;
put an end to this idiotic struggle to make the best of two worlds. She
had shown him clearly to which world he belonged. Let him now justify
her. She was aboard his ship, in his power, and he desired her.

He laughed softly, jeeringly, as he leaned on the taffrail, looking down
at the phosphorescent gleam in the ship's wake, and his own laughter
startled him by its evil note. He checked suddenly, and shivered. A sob
broke from him to end that ribald burst of mirth. He took his face in
his hands and found a chill moisture on his brow.

Meanwhile, Lord Julian, who knew the feminine part of humanity rather
better than Captain Blood, was engaged in solving the curious problem
that had so completely escaped the buccaneer. He was spurred to it, I
suspect, by certain vague stirrings of jealousy. Miss Bishop's conduct
in the perils through which they had come had brought him at last
to perceive that a woman may lack the simpering graces of cultured
femininity and yet because of that lack be the more admirable. He
wondered what precisely might have been her earlier relations with
Captain Blood, and was conscious of a certain uneasiness which urged him
now to probe the matter.

His lordship's pale, dreamy eyes had, as I have said, a habit of
observing things, and his wits were tolerably acute.

He was bla