is, you and I."

They went off together, skirting the redoubt, and so through courtyard
and garden to the house where Arabella waited anxiously. The sight of
her uncle brought her infinite relief, not only on his own account, but
on account also of Captain Blood.

"You took a great risk, sir," she gravely told Lord Julian after the
ordinary greetings had been exchanged.

But Lord Julian answered her as he had answered Major Mallard. "There
was no risk, ma'am."

She looked at him in some astonishment. His long, aristocratic face wore
a more melancholy, pensive air than usual. He answered the enquiry in
her glance:

"So that Blood's ship were allowed to pass the fort, no harm could come
to Colonel Bishop. Blood pledged me his word for that."

A faint smile broke the set of her lips, which hitherto had been
wistful, and a little colour tinged her cheeks. She would have pursued
the subject, but the Deputy-Governor's mood did not permit it. He
sneered and snorted at the notion of Blood's word being good for
anything, forgetting that he owed to it his own preservation at that
moment.

At supper, and for long thereafter he talked of nothing but Blood--of
how he would lay him by the heels, and what hideous things he would
perform upon his body. And as he drank heavily the while, his speech
became increasingly gross and his threats increasingly horrible; until
in the end Arabella withdrew, white-faced and almost on the verge of
tears. It was not often that Bishop revealed himself to his niece. Oddly
enough, this coarse, overbearing planter went in a certain awe of that
slim girl. It was as if she had inherited from her father the respect in
which he had always been held by his brother.

Lord Julian, who began to find Bishop disgusting beyond endurance,
excused himself soon after, and went in quest of the lady. He had yet to
deliver the message from Captain Blood, and this, he thought, would be
his opportunity. But Miss Bishop had retired for the night, and
Lord Julian must curb his impatience--it amounted by now to nothing
less--until the morrow.

Very early next morning, before the heat of the day came to render the
open intolerable to his lordship, he espied her from his window moving
amid the azaleas in the garden. It was a fitting setting for one who was
still as much a delightful novelty to him in womanhood as was the azalea
among flowers. He hurried forth to join her, and when, aroused from
her pensiveness, she