I was prepared to find that Butler had carried my words forward. I returned to the deck after breakfast, and the man trudged to the forecastle, and not long afterward I observed the four seamen, the fifth being at the helm, engaged in earnest conversation. They talked, pipe in mouth, their hands deep buried in their capacious breeches pockets, and sometimes they talked with their backs upon one another, and sometimes they would pace the deck, passing one another, but always talking, and frequently they directed their eyes aft, insomuch that I expected every minute that the whole group would approach me and oblige me to share in the discussion.

My manner and my words when I had visited madame below had been altogether too pronounced for so shrewd an intelligence as that of Don Christoval to miss the true meaning of. In short, I had as good as said that I did not consider the lady to be his wife; that she had been abducted—ferociously and inhumanly stolen from her father's home, and that we Englishmen who formed his crew had been betrayed into an act of criminal villiany by his rascally lies. All this I was conscious I had as good as said, because, meaning it, I had looked it, and, in a sentence, I had suggested it. I therefore concluded that the two Spaniards would talk this matter of my suspicions over, decide upon some prompt course of action, and come to me on deck—but what to do and what to say? Would Don Christoval admit the adventure to be one of abduction, pleading the necessity of representing himself as married that he might obtain the assistance of English seamen, since it was clear that he would not ship Spanish sailors for the expedition; or would he approach me with threats, defying me to disprove his statement that the lady below was his wife, and giving me to understand that if I did not mind my own business——.

My mind was rambling in speculations of this kind when I heard the sound of a guitar and a voice singing. The skylight lay open; I heard it as distinctly as though I were in the cabin. Don Lazarillo sat smoking at the table, keeping time with his fingers, the rings upon them sparkling as he tapped. It was not he who was playing the guitar and singing; therefore it was Don Christoval. The sounds came from the after-part of the interior, and I had no doubt whatever that madame's door was open, and that Don Christoval was touching the strings and lifting up his voice with some quite superstitious or quite rational hope of exorcising the demon of madness out of the girl by the bewitching music he was making.

Bewitching it was. I listened, wholly fascinated by it. His voice was a clear, sweet, most thrilling and lovely tenor, soft and yet penetrating, and controlled, so far as I could possibly judge, by the most exquisite art. Whether he had ever before produced his guitar I can not say; certainly this was the first time I had heard the sound of it. He sang several airs; one of them so haunted me that I remember long afterward humming it over to a friend of mine who was a very good musician in his way, and he instantly pronounced it a composition of Mozart, giving it an Italian name which I have forgotten. I should never have supposed that music possessed the magic claimed for it until I heard that sweet, thrilling tenor voice, threaded by the tones of the delicately-touched guitar. The songs in succession wrought a fairy atmosphere for the senses. The schooner melted out—the ocean vanished. I was transported to a land sweet with the aroma of the orange grove, romantic with Moorish palaces, melodious with the laughter of dancers and the merry rattle of the castanets.

Bless me, thought I, as I paced the deck afresh when the singing was ended, a man need not go to sea to visit distant countries when he may travel farther than sail or steam can convey him by sitting at home and listening to a tenor voice accompanied by a guitar.

Half an hour later the two Spaniards made their appearance. I had marked the hideous cook steal to the companion-way, and judged that he was keeping watch. The two Dons, with lighted cigars in their mouths, walked the deck arm-in-arm. Don Christoval seemed to notice that the men forward were observing him with unusual attention. I assumed this because I perceived that he suddenly put on an air of carelessness, of ease, even of gayety, such as certainly was not visible in him when he first showed himself. This air I further remarked was swiftly copied by his companion, but on him it sat with a horrible awkwardness. He had neither the figure, the beauty, nor the skill to act as his friend did.

Would Don Christoval challenge me for my suspicions? If so, I should be honest with him; tell him in unmistakable English what my conviction was; inform him that I would no longer share in the dastardly crime into which he had betrayed his sailors; and insist that I should be transshipped to the first vessel that passed, or that I should be suffered to carry the schooner close enough to a coast, the nearest at hand, to enable me to get ashore. It was likely enough that my full mind showed in my face. A few times I caught him eyeing me askance, but, beyond calling out some commonplace to me about the weather, the progress of the schooner, and so forth, he said nothing.

It was, however, clear to me that, let his thoughts be what they would, he could say nothing. I was the only navigator aboard the vessel; he was entirely at my mercy, therefore; he would rightly fear that any menaces, any bullying, any tall-talk, must only result in causing me to sullenly throw up my command; in which case the schooner would be but a little less helpless than were she reduced to the condition of a sheer hulk by a gale of wind.

At noon I took an observation. Butler came aft to relieve me, and I went to my quarters to work out my sights. When I had worked out my sights and found out the position of the schooner on the chart, I lighted a pipe and sat down to reflect. I was now so perfectly sure that the unhappy young lady in the cabin had been kidnapped that my thoughts were never for an instant influenced by the consideration that there might be a probability of the Spaniard's story proving true. Everything pointed to this expedition as an adventure of abduction. The sailors affirmed that the girl was bleeding and insensible when carried through the hall past the room in which two of them with drawn cutlasses were guarding her father and brother. This, then, signified that she had been forcibly seized, and the state of her apparel and the scratches upon her shoulder proved that there had been a struggle. Would she have struggled had Don Christoval been her husband, to whom she was yearning to be reunited?

My blood felt hot in my veins when I thought upon this outrage; when I reflected how I had been made a party to this deed of villainy; how I, as an Englishman, had been courted by a cunning, clever lie to abet the stealing of a countrywoman of my own from her father's home in England by a brace, as I might take them, of unprincipled Spanish adventurers.

Now, while I thus sat musing over my position, and considering what course to shape to carry me clear of the dangerous association into which misadventure had brought me, I was startled by a cry in the adjacent cabin—a cry sharp, abrupt, terrible: affecting the ear as a lightning flash affects the eye. The pipe I was about to raise to my lips was arrested midway. I believe I am no coward, yet I must own that that cry, that penetrating cry, seemed to thicken my blood, seemed to stop the pulsation of my heart.

But the pause with me was brief. I dashed down my pipe, sprang to the bulk-head door and flung it open. And now what a picture did I see! The tall, commanding figure of Don Christoval was in the act of sinking to the deck; his hand was upon the table, but the fingers were slowly slipping from the edge of it, and, even as I looked, the man without a sound fell at his length and lay motionless. In the doorway of the port or left-hand berth stood the lady whom I have heretofore styled Madame, but whom I will henceforth call Ida Noble. She grasped a knife in her hand—a long carving knife it seemed to me, and I remember noticing a red gleam in it as the vessel rolled, slipping the sunshine out of a mirror toward where the girl was. She stood erect, with her eyes fixed upon the body of the Spaniard; she was as stirless as he; the figures of them both at that instant might have passed as a brace of posture-makers representing a tragedy in one of those drawing-room performances called tableaux vivants. Behind a chair on the starboard side of the table crouched the figure of Mariana. He squatted, and his attitude was exactly that of a monkey. His face was green; his wide-open eyes disclosed twice the usual surface of eyeball; his features were convulsed with terror, and never yet was there an artist whose imagination could have reached to the height of that fellow's hideousness, as he crouched, stabbed also, as I then believed, though this was not so.

A mad woman grasping a long knife is a formidable object; much more formidable is she when that knife is stained with blood, and when the person she has slain is still in view, lying a corpse a little distance away from her. On my showing myself, Mariana cried out, but whether in Spanish or English I knew not. What was I to do? What would you do were you suddenly confronted by a mad woman armed with a long knife? I looked up at the skylight and saw the horror-stricken countenance of Don Lazarillo peering down; but even as my eye went in a glance to the Spaniard's livid face, one of the sailors, and then another of the sailors, came to his side. Count twenty, and the time you will occupy in doing so will comprise the period from the moment of my opening the door to look out down to this instant.

Next moment the girl threw the knife on the deck with a gesture of abhorrence, courtesied with irony to the body of Don Christoval, and closed the door of the berth upon herself. Then there was a rush. We could all find our courage now. Mariana sprang from behind his chair, overturning it; Don Lazarillo, followed by the two sailors, came in a few bounds through the companion-hatch. I stepped to the side of Don Christoval's body, and stood looking upon him. Stone dead I knew him to be. In Calcutta during a cholera outbreak, and on board an emigrant ship visited with fever, I had many a time stood beside the dying and the dead, and the spectacle of death was very familiar to me.

"Lock her door!" shrieked Don Lazarillo.

One of the seamen picked up the knife and viewed it at arm's length. I carefully turned the body over.

"Ay, there it is," said I, pointing to a cut slightly stained with blood in the Spaniard's waistcoat. The wound was in the left ribs, and one had but to glance at the knife to cease to wonder that the man should have dropped dead.

"Lock the door!" again shrieked Don Lazarillo in his broken English, looking from the body of his friend to the door, and from the door to the body of his friend, and recoiling, and shrinking and hugging himself, and so munching his lips that one watched to see froth upon them—doing all this as he looked.

Mariana repeatedly crossed himself, uttering all sorts of Spanish ejaculations in a voice like the subdued low of a calf.

"Is he dead, sir?" asked one of the sailors.

"He can never be more dead," said I, stooping to look into the face of the body. "They drove her mad, and this is how she requites them. A cruel, bloody business, my lads. Fling that knife overboard."

The fellow launched it javelin-fashion through an open port-hole. Don Lazarillo began to scream out in Spanish. His meaning might have some reference to securing the lady; I do not know.

"Silence!" I roared. "Do you want to be the next victim?" and in my wrath I made an infuriate gesture as of stabbing; on which, with one wild look at me, he fled up the companion steps and remained above, viewing us through the skylight.

Butler and another seaman, both very pale, and fetching their breath quickly, entered the cabin and looked at the body.

"Here's a murdering job to happen!" said Scott.

"Who's done this?" cried Butler, who had been somewhere forward when Don Christoval's wild death-shriek had sounded.

Mariana, with a paralytic gesture, pointed to Miss Noble's berth.

"Who's done it?" repeated Butler, in a voice strong and hoarse with horror.

"The girl whom these Spaniards have driven mad," said I. I turned to Mariana. "Did you see Don Christoval stabbed?"

"Ah, Dios! yes," he answered; and in language which is to be as little conveyed as his voice, or the expressions which chased his face, which at every instant gave a new character to his ugliness, he contrived to make us understand this: that Don Christoval had entered the lady's room, where he, Mariana, heard him address her soothingly; that the door was suddenly flung open, and that, at the same moment, even as the Spaniard stood on the threshold, the girl buried the knife in his side.

"How did she come by the knife?" cried Butler.

Mariana, trembling violently, with his eyes fixed upon the door of Miss Noble's berth, as though at every moment he expected to behold it thrown open, made us understand that the negro boy, some time during the morning, had left a basket of the cabin cutlery upon the table, and that the girl must have looked out and possessed herself of a knife at some moment when the two Spaniards were on deck, and when he—Mariana—had quitted his post of sentry to enter Don Christoval's berth. This was conjecture on the fellow's part, but beyond doubt it was accurate.

Don Lazarillo continued to gaze at us through the skylight with an expression as of a horrible sneer upon his face. I again stooped over the form of Don Christoval, felt his pulse, and examined his half-closed, fast-glazing eyes, then bade a couple of the seamen pick the body up and convey it to the cabin the Spaniard had occupied. While this was doing, I grasped the handle of the door of Miss Noble's room.

"Mind!" shrieked Don Lazarillo from above. Mariana ran on deck. I felt the idleness of announcing myself by knocking. More knives than one it was possible she might have concealed; I therefore at first held the door but a little way open and looked in.

The girl was standing beside the bunk or sleeping-shelf; her elbows were upon the edge of it, her cheeks in her hands, and she stood motionlessly gazing, as I might suppose, through the port-hole. She was robed as in the morning; that is to say, in a crimson dressing-gown, which, in that era of short skirts, clothed her to her heels. She was but a little above the average stature of woman, though she had looked far taller than she really was when she stood in the doorway grasping the knife, with her eyes upon the dead Spaniard.

Finding her unarmed, I entered, carefully sweeping the room as I did so with my eyes for any signs of a knife or other weapon. The four seamen stood in the doorway, and she did not turn her head. I approached her, keeping a distance of some two or three feet between us, and prepared, poor lady! for any act of violence. Still she continued to stare through the port-hole.

"Miss Noble," said I, "you smiled at me this morning. Look at me now. You will remember me as your friend."

She turned her head slowly; not more mechanical could have been that extraordinary movement had clock-work produced it. When her soft brown eyes—in which assuredly I witnessed nothing of that sparkle or fire of madness which is said to burn in the vision of the insane—were upon me, she frowned and bit her under lip, exposing her small white front teeth. I believed from her expression that she was struggling with her memory. She then suddenly turned fully round, as though sensible of being watched from the door, and the sailors, to the wild look she gave them, stirred and fell back with uneasy shuffling motions of their feet. She stared at them for a while, and afterward at me, preserving her frown, and holding her lip under her teeth; she was deadly white, but spite of her frown, which you would have thought must give an expression of disdain or anger or contempt to her brow, her face was meaningless. She eyed me fixedly for some moments, then, with the former slow motion of her head, resumed her first posture. I stepped to the door.

"What is to be done?" said I.

"It's a cruel business. The Spaniard's been rightly sarved out," exclaimed one of the sailors.

"What is to be done?" I repeated; for here, to be sure, was a condition of ocean life that had never before been encountered by my experience.

The men gazed at the girl in silence. I mused, and presently said, "One of you keep this door; the rest of us must turn to and search the cabin, to make sure there is nothing in it with which she can hurt herself."

There were four of us, and there being little to examine, we had soon satisfied ourselves that there was no weapon anywhere hidden. She took not the least notice of us; but when I explored her sleeping-berth, upon whose edge, as I have told you, her elbows reposed, she fell back a step or two, and then, going to the arm-chair, seated herself, clasping her knees and rooting her eyes to the deck.

"Will she have a knife about her?" said Butler, in a hoarse whisper.

I thoroughly considered this, and, after a narrow scrutiny of her, decided that she had not concealed a knife upon her, and I was the more willing to believe so because I had not the heart—I will not say the courage—to search her. It shocked me to think of offering any violence to the poor girl, and violence I knew it must come to—she would resist, a struggle would increase her madness—if I laid my hands upon her. But I was certain she had not concealed a knife. The dressing-gown she wore was without a pocket. The sleeves were loose, and while she stood at the bunk I had noticed that her arms, whose wrists were still clasped by bracelets, were bare, whence I concluded that the dressing-gown concealed the ball attire she had been brought aboard in. So I decided that she had not secreted a weapon, because, recollecting her attire as she lay upon the sofa in the cabin after she had been brought to the schooner, I could not conceive that it offered any points for the concealment of a knife.

I closed the door upon her, and we stood outside consulting. Our debate determined us to this: that while she continued in this passive condition she was to be left as she was; that for the present the five seamen would take it turn and turn about to watch that she did not quit her room; that she was to be fed as heretofore, that is to say, food and wine were to be placed before her, of which she would partake if she chose, for no man could compel her to eat. Then, no longer choosing that the helmsman should remain alone on deck—for Don Lazarillo, Mariana, and the negro boy counted for nothing—I went to the companion steps and was followed by Butler and two others.

Don Lazarillo and Mariana stood a little way forward of the skylight. They conversed, and their gestures expressed unbounded horror and dismay. On our appearing, they fell silent and watched us. Some distance beyond them was the figure of the negro boy. There was nothing in sight. The white canvas soared round and brilliant, and the rigging was vocal with the gushing of the blue breeze. Astern of us ran an arrowy wake of foam, and off the weather bow rose a steady sound of seething, like to the noise made by the boiling foot of a cataract heard afar.

I took up a position near the tiller, that was in the grasp of the seaman Tubb, and the sailors stood near me.

"What's happened below?" said Tubb.

"The tall Spaniard's been stabbed dead by the mad lady," answered South.

Tubb delivered himself of a long whistle, following it on by an agitated swing of the tiller that hove the schooner to the wind two points before he could recover her.

"And now what is to be done?" said I. "You see the pass we've been brought into. Two men dead of the adventure, and the rest of us guilty of a deed that must earn us transportation for life should the law get hold of us. What's to be done, I say? Is this voyage to Cuba to be prosecuted? Our duty is—and let me tell you our policy is—to make all the restitution that is possible, and that we can alone do by conveying the poor lady home."

"I ain't going home," cried Butler in a voice of obstinacy, smiting his thigh.

Don Lazarillo and Mariana crept, or sneaked rather, by a pace nearer to us and stood listening.

"And I ain't going home," said Tubb, fetching the head of the tiller a whack. "You talk of transportation for life, Mr. Portlack; d'ye want it to happen, sir?"

"No," I answered; "but I wish to do what is right, and to make it as right as right can be by doing it quickly. The lady must be restored to her friends."

"No offense, Mr. Portlack," said Scott, "but we aren't to forget that you're on the right side of the hedge. You wasn't in the melhee; we was. Your going home can't sinnify; ourn means lagging for all hands."

The two Spaniards sneaked a little closer.

"I wish to suggest nothing likely to imperil you," said I. "Though I was never willingly of you—you don't want me to tell you how it happens that I'm here; yet being of you, you'll find me with you, content to share in all that may befall you. As to my being on the right side of the hedge," cried I, rounding upon Scott, "that's but a notion of yours. The lawyers may think very much otherwise. But I say this, that since these two Spaniards have decoyed our heads into a noose, the only way to avoid being strangled is to whip our heads out again; and d'ye ask how that's to be done? My answer is, Do what is right. Act so that you'll be able to say, should you come to be charged as helpers in this crime of abduction: We believed the lady to be the Spaniard's wife; we were told that a man had a right to his own, and we were willing to help him to his own, but the moment we found we had been deceived we turned to like honest men, to make all the amends in our power by restoring the poor lady to her friends. That is what's in my head, and it is the advice I give you, and wish you to act upon for my sake and for yours."

South looked thoughtfully at Butler; but Butler, with an angry countenance, vengefully smiting his thigh again with his clinched fist, cried out, "There's to be no going home with me. There's to be no taking the chance of the law with me. There's to be no risking even a week o' jail with me. Ye may call it Cuba, or ye may call it Madagascar, but let no man speak of the United Kingdom. I've got my liberty, and I'm for keeping of it. 'Sides," he whipped out, "who's going to pay me my money, now the Spaniard as hired us is dead and gone?"

The eyes of the men at this were at once bent upon Don Lazarillo.

"Sooner than go home I'd start away in that there boat," said Scott, pointing to the cutter on the main deck, "and take my chance of making the land or being picked up. I once had a fortnight of quod for refusing to sail after joining. That was enough for me. No more, thank ye." He stepped to the rail and violently expectorated.

"Who's going to pay us?" said Trapp. "If t'others are of my mind, there'll be no leaving this schooner till we've received every farden of our money. We've earnt it, by——!" he added, hitting the tiller head another thump.

"Mr. Portlack," said Butler, gazing at me gloomily and mutinously, "you still talk as if you was cocksure that the lady wasn't the tall gent's wife."

I paused while I gazed at him, then, with vehement strides, walked up to Don Lazarillo.

"You and your dead friend," I cried, staring into the shrinking and working face of the man, "have cheated me and the men here by your lies into the commission of a crime. You know," I thundered, determined to terrorize him into a confession of the truth, "that the poor lady below, whom you have driven mad, was not Don Christoval's wife. Dare to tell me she was, you villain, and I'll fling you overboard!"

"What ees it you say?" he cried, with his swarthy face of the color of pepper with fear.

"You understand me!" I shouted, addressing Mariana. "You have been in the secret, too, from the beginning. Own it, you dog, own it, or I'll throttle you."

I raised my hand; the ugly creature delivered a singular cry and dropped on his knees.

"SeÑor Portlack," he whined, "spare my life, for the blessed Virgin's sake, and if I do not tell you the truth may Satan catch my soul now and carry it away to eternal torment. The seÑorita was not the cavalier's wife. The caballero's story was true in all but that part. She was the lady of his love, but not his wife. If I'm not speaking the truth, may my soul be tormented for ever and ever." Saying which he crossed himself and stood up.

The obligation of feigning wrath alone preserved me from bursting into a laugh at the sight of his hideous face convulsed with fear.

"Explain to Don Lazarillo," cried I, sternly, "what you have told me."

He did so. Don Lazarillo watched him with sparkling eyes and ashen cheek, and on his ceasing made as if he would strike him.

"Will you deny that Mariana speaks the truth?" I exclaimed.

The Spaniard shot at me a look of mingled malice, hate, and fright, then, with a shrug of the shoulders that convulsed his figure, he turned his back, and, with clasped hands, stood viewing the ocean over the rail.

"Now, men," said I, addressing Butler and the others, "you have heard the truth for yourselves, and you may read it also in that Spanish gentleman's behavior. Isn't it abominable that we Englishmen, or let me say that you Englishmen, should have been tricked by the lies of a brace of foreigners into helping them to steal a poor young lady of your own country from her father's home? For what purpose was this done? There was little enough love in it, I'll swear. She is no doubt an heiress, and the Don that lies dead below hoped, by stealing her, to steal her fortune also; and you may take it that yonder gentleman," I continued, pointing at Don Lazarillo, "entered upon this inhuman undertaking as a speculation. That's my notion, and if he understands what I'm saying, he knows that I've hit the truth. He was to share in the plunder, on condition of his finding money enough to equip this expedition."

My eyes rested upon Mariana as I spoke; the ugly rascal, to whom my words seemed perfectly intelligible, let his head sink, in an affirmative gesture. The wretch, in fact, was horribly frightened, feared for his life, in short, and by the looks of him I might not only know that he was willing to tell all, but to tell more than all, to appease my wrath, which I must own was largely simulated.

Butler stepped up to Don Lazarillo, whose back was still upon us, and touched the man's elbow with his forefinger.

"Here," said he, "what about my money?"

Don Lazarillo appeared deaf, and continued to stare over the rail. Butler thrust at his elbow again with his long forefinger.

"I am asking," he said, "about my money. Who's a-going to pay me?"

The other seamen now drew close to the Spaniard, who stood as though deaf. Mariana rapidly and hoarsely uttered a sentence or two in Spanish, probably a translation of Butler's words. Don Lazarillo then whipped round; his eyes glowed like live coals, but his ashy pallor was more defined than before. On finding himself confronted by the three sailors, he placed himself in the posture of a man at bay with a sword in his hand, only, happily, he was without a sword.

"What do you want?" he cried.

"Who's a-going to pay us?" shouted Butler, unnecessarily exerting his lungs, as the custom is with us English when we address foreigners, whose incapacity to understand seems to suggest deafness to our insular minds.

Don Lazarillo, looking toward me, exclaimed, "I speak about dat wiz ze Capitan Portlack."

"Ay," cried Scott, "but if you can talk to him, you can talk to us. It's we that's consarned. It's us as wants to know who's a-going to pay us. You've brought us into a blooming mess with your lies, and the five of us men, as Captain Dopping shipped at Cadiz, stands for to be transported if so be as our law catches hold of us, and all along of you and him as lays below. If you can talk to Mr. Portlack, you can talk to us."

"What you weesh me say?" cried the miserable Spaniard, extending his arms, and casting a look of entreaty at me.

"Who's a-going to pay us men?" vociferated Butler, striking the palm of his left hand with a leg-of-mutton fist. The men stood so close to Don Lazarillo that he was forced to dodge his head here and there to catch a sight of Mariana, to whom he cried out something in his native tongue.

"SeÑor Portlack," said the cook, in a cringing attitude, "Don Lazarillo beg me say he will speak wid you. I will translate."

"Let it be so, men," I exclaimed; "you'll do no good by shouting questions to a man who doesn't understand you."

They drew away sulkily. Don Lazarillo pulled off his hat to pass a large colored silk handkerchief over his forehead. He then stepped up to me. The cook posted himself close to him, and the sailors, with whom now was the negro boy, took up a station within easy earshot. Mariana translating, the dialogue took this form:—

"The men wish to know who is to pay them their wages?"

"Don Christoval is now dead," answered the Spaniard. "This adventure therefore terminates!"

"How?—terminates?" I cried. "We are still upon the high seas. We have still the young lady with us to restore to those from whom you and your friend stole her. No, no, this adventure has not yet terminated!"

"What do you mean to do?" he asked.

"That is no answer to my question. Who will pay those men for the work they have done, the risks they have run, and have yet to run?"

He put his hand to his brow, and, after a pause, said, "I must think."

The sailors fell a-shouting exclamations. The chorus was swelled by the voices of the man at the helm, and by the fellow below, who had got upon the cabin table, and stood with his head in the open skylight, listening.

"Silence!" I cried; "how am I to transact your business if you interrupt me? The men," I continued, addressing the Spaniard, "look to you for payment. They will not lose sight of you until you pay them. Have you money with you, or the equivalent of money?" I added, fixing my eyes upon his rings and brooch; "for I must be paid, Don Lazarillo, and they must be paid."

"I will answer. I will be honorable. I will give my word; and the word of a Spanish gentlemen is gold." A growl proceeded from the seamen. "But first, as a matter of courtesy, to help my mind in its blindness—for the death of my friend has caused my brains to spin round in my head—I entreat you, seÑor, to tell me what are your intentions?"

"To restore the young lady to her friends."

"What!" he cried, shouting the words with a face of horror to Mariana; "you will proceed to England?"

I responded with a vehement nod.

"Then vot sall become of me?" he exclaimed in English.

I shrugged my shoulders. He folded his arms tightly upon his breast, and, with bowed head, fell to measuring a few feet of the deck. We all watched him in silence while he thus walked. Suddenly he stopped, and, turning upon Mariana, addressed him volubly and with amazing energy, making a very windmill of his arms. I knew that he was saying a great deal more than Mariana could translate, more, indeed, to judge from the expression that entered the cook's face, than the repulsive-looking creature would choose to translate. Nevertheless, I waited in patience, making a single gesture of command to the sailors to be still.

Mariana then spoke; the substance of his speech was this: Don Lazarillo asked for a few hours. He desired to look over the effects of his dead friend; he desired time to mature a proposal which he hoped to make to me. This was substantially all that Mariana translated. Yet, owing to his slow delivery and to his broken-winded English, the matter he delivered appeared to contain much more than was in it. I had no doubt, however, that Don Lazarillo in his speech had acquainted the fellow with some half-formed scheme in his mind, as good for Mariana perhaps as for himself.

I told the cook to inform the Don that we would give him until six o'clock that evening, and that if he was not ready with his proposals by that hour, I should shift the schooner's helm for England, where, on my arrival, it would be my duty to deliver him and Mariana into the hands of justice. The cook, in translating this, was almost as ashen in color as the other.

Don Lazarillo descended into the cabin. Butler came up to me.

"You're merely frightening the man, I hope, sir," said he, "with this here talk of sailing to England?"

"Let's settle with him first," I answered, "and then I'll call a council of the crew. Meanwhile it is senseless to keep the schooner under all this canvas. Let us shorten sail and lay her with her head to the east until we hear what Don Lazarillo has to say for himself."

He looked doubtfully round the sea, then consented. So we reduced the schooner down to what is termed a scandalized mainsail and a jib, and all that afternoon she lay under that canvas, blowing along very quietly eastward.

Some time about four o'clock I went below and asked Trapp, who was still on watch in the cabin, if all had been quiet in the lady's cabin.

"Ne'er so much noise as a mouse would have made, sir," said he.

I lightly tapped on the young lady's door, and without waiting for a response, which I knew I should not obtain, I turned the handle and looked in. The girl was seated in her chair, but her head lay back upon the cushioned round of it. Her eyes were sealed, and her lips apart. I looked at her, scarcely knowing whether she was alive or dead; but presently observing that her bosom rose and fell, I went to her side, put my ear to her mouth, and heard her breathing regularly and peacefully. I stood a while looking at her, my heart full of pity. I peered closely at her fingers: her rings were rich and beautiful—diamonds and rubies of great value; but I might make sure now there was no wedding-ring buried among the three or four which armored the finger the ring would have been on. One little foot showed, and I perceived that she was shod with white satin. There was something to shock me in the ironic contrast created by the sight of that satin shoe—the contrast between the grim and tragic reality that was now hers and the festal vision of the ball-room, with its swimming figures, the bright music of the dance, the gleam of fans, the scent of flowers.

I was happy to discover that she was able to sleep. It seemed to my plain mind a good sign, for I had often been told that sleeplessness was one of the horrible conditions of insanity; that not to be able to sleep drove men mad; and that when they were mad still they were sleepless. Strange as it will seem, I could not, I did not, associate any horror of assassination with that restful figure. I had seen her standing at the door, and had marked the red gleam upon the knife she held; I had seen the tall and handsome Spaniard in the act of falling, then tumbling his whole length and expiring. Yet I could gaze at this poor girl without the least emotion of aversion, without the least sense of that sort of horrid unaccountable fascination with which red-handed crime constrains the gaze of the spectator.

This was not, I think, because I knew she was mad, and, being mad, irresponsible, and, being irresponsible, virtually guiltless. No; it was because of a singular atmosphere of purity and sweetness about her as she now lay sleeping. Beautiful she was not. Indeed, she was not even what might be called pretty; but now that she slept the demon within her slept also. What was native in her showed in her countenance. You witnessed it in this slumber of madness as you would have beheld it in her waking hours of sanity. I stood viewing her and I thought to myself she is a refined lady, pure, gentle, and good.