rest not near. He will be at the bank
at two, with about twenty men. Take your own measures. All here favor
you. He threatens me violence unless I marry him at once. He watches
_The Songstress_, but if you can leave her at anchor and land in a
boat there will be no suspicion. I swear this is true; do not punish
me more by disbelieving me. I make no protest. But if you come back
to me I will give you, in return for pardon, _anything you ask_!

"CHRISTINA.

"P.S.---M. and the C. are on bad terms, and M. will not be active
against you."

Upon the whole I thought this would bring him. I doubted whether he
would believe very much in it, but it looked probable (indeed, it was
word for word true, as far as it went), and held out a bait that he
would find it hard to resist. Again, he was so fond of a bold stroke,
and so devoid of fear, that it was very likely he could come and see
if it were true. If, as we suspected, he already had a considerable
body of adherents on shore, he could land and reconnoiter without very
great danger of falling into the colonel's hands. Finally, even if
he didn't come, we hoped the letter would be enough to divert his
attention from any thought of fugitive boats and runaway lovers. I
could have made the terms of it even more alluring, but the signorina,
with that extraordinarily distorted morality distinctive of her sex,
refused to swear to anything literally untrue in a letter which was
itself from beginning to end a monumental falsehood; though not a
student of ethics, she was keenly alive to the distinction between
the _expressio falsi_ and the _suppressio veri_. The only passage she
doubted about was the last, "If you come back to me." "But then he
won't come back _to me_ if I'm not there!" she exclaimed triumphantly.
What happened to him after he landed--whether he cooked the colonel's
goose or the colonel cooked his--I really could not afford to
consider. As a matter of personal preference, I should have liked the
former, but I did not allow any such considerations to influence my
conduct. My only hope was that the killing would take long enough to
leave time for our unobtrusive exit. At the same time, as a matter of
betting, I would have laid long odds against McGregor.

To my mind it is nearly as difficult to be consistently selfish as to
be absolutely unselfish. I had, at this crisis, every inducement to
concentrate all my efforts on myself, but I could not get Jones out of
my head. I