concerned just then with her movements.

In the cabin he flung into a chair, and exploded, with a violence
altogether foreign to his nature.

"Damme if ever I met a man I liked better, or even a man I liked as
well. Yet there's nothing to be done with him."

"So I heard," she admitted in a small voice. She was very white, and she
kept her eyes upon her folded hands.

He looked up in surprise, and then sat conning her with brooding glance.
"I wonder, now," he said presently, "if the mischief is of your working.
Your words have rankled with him. He threw them at me again and again.
He wouldn't take the King's commission; he wouldn't take my hand even.
What's to be done with a fellow like that? He'll end on a yardarm
for all his luck. And the quixotic fool is running into danger at the
present moment on our behalf."

"How?" she asked him with a sudden startled interest.

"How? Have you forgotten that he's sailing to Jamaica, and that Jamaica
is the headquarters of the English fleet? True, your uncle commands
it...."

She leaned across the table to interrupt him, and he observed that her
breathing had grown labored, that her eyes were dilating in alarm.

"But there is no hope for him in that!" she cried. "Oh, don't imagine
it! He has no bitterer enemy in the world! My uncle is a hard,
unforgiving man. I believe that it was nothing but the hope of taking
and hanging Captain Blood that made my uncle leave his Barbados
plantations to accept the deputy-governorship of Jamaica. Captain Blood
doesn't know that, of course...." She paused with a little gesture of
helplessness.

"I can't think that it would make the least difference if he did," said
his lordship gravely. "A man who can forgive such an enemy as Don Miguel
and take up this uncompromising attitude with me isn't to be judged by
ordinary rules. He's chivalrous to the point of idiocy."

"And yet he has been what he has been and done what he has done in these
last three years," said she, but she said it sorrowfully now, without
any of her earlier scorn.

Lord Julian was sententious, as I gather that he often was. "Life can be
infernally complex," he sighed.

CHAPTER XXI. THE SERVICE OF KING JAMES

Miss Arabella Bishop was aroused very early on the following morning by
the brazen voice of a bugle and the insistent clanging of a bell in the
ship's belfry. As she lay awake, idly watching the rippled green water
that appeared to be streaming past the hea