me pass."

He stepped aside, and with the broad feathered hat which he still held
in his hand, he waved her on towards the house.

"I'll not be detaining you any longer, ma'am. After all, the cursed
thing I did for nothing can be undone. Ye'll remember afterwards that it
was your hardness drove me."

She moved to depart, then checked, and faced him again. It was she now
who was on her defence, her voice quivering with indignation.

"You take that tone! You dare to take that tone!" she cried, astounding
him by her sudden vehemence. "You have the effrontery to upbraid me
because I will not take your hands when I know how they are stained;
when I know you for a murderer and worse?"

He stared at her open-mouthed.

"A murderer--I?" he said at last.

"Must I name your victims? Did you not murder Levasseur?"

"Levasseur?" He smiled a little. "So they've told you about that!"

"Do you deny it?"

"I killed him, it is true. I can remember killing another man in
circumstances that were very similar. That was in Bridgetown on the
night of the Spanish raid. Mary Traill would tell you of it. She was
present."

He clapped his hat on his head with a certain abrupt fierceness, and
strode angrily away, before she could answer or even grasp the full
significance of what he had said.

CHAPTER XXIII. HOSTAGES

Peter Blood stood in the pillared portico of Government House, and with
unseeing eyes that were laden with pain and anger, stared out across the
great harbour of Port Royal to the green hills rising from the farther
shore and the ridge of the Blue Mountains beyond, showing hazily through
the quivering heat.

He was aroused by the return of the negro who had gone to announce him,
and following now this slave, he made his way through the house to the
wide piazza behind it, in whose shade Colonel Bishop and my Lord Julian
Wade took what little air there was.

"So ye've come," the Deputy-Governor hailed him, and followed the
greeting by a series of grunts of vague but apparently ill-humoured
import.

He did not trouble to rise, not even when Lord Julian, obeying the
instincts of finer breeding, set him the example. From under scowling
brows the wealthy Barbados planter considered his sometime slave, who,
hat in hand, leaning lightly upon his long beribboned cane, revealed
nothing in his countenance of the anger which was being steadily
nourished by this cavalier reception.

At last, with scowling brow and in