To show I could be a man, I resolved to utter no sound as long as Dominic himself had the force to keep his lips closed.  Nothing but silence becomes certain situations.  Moreover, the experience of treachery seemed to spread a hopeless drowsiness over my thoughts and senses.  For an hour or more we watched our pursuer surging out nearer and nearer from amongst the squalls that sometimes hid her altogether.  But even when not seen, we felt her there like a knife at our throats.  She gained on us frightfully.  And the Tremolino, in a fierce breeze and in much smoother water, swung on easily under her one sail, with something appallingly careless in the joyous freedom of her motion.  Another half-hour went by.  I could not stand it any longer.

“They will get the poor barky,” I stammered out suddenly, almost on the verge of tears.

Dominic stirred no more than a carving.  A sense of catastrophic loneliness overcame my inexperienced soul.  The vision of my companions passed before me.  The whole Royalist gang was in Monte Carlo now, I reckoned.  And they appeared to me clear-cut and very small, with affected voices and stiff gestures, like a procession of rigid marionettes upon a toy stage.  I gave a start.  What was this?  A mysterious, remorseless whisper came from within the motionless black hood at my side.

“Il faul la tuer.”

I heard it very well.

“What do you say, Dominic?” I asked, moving nothing but my lips.

And the whisper within the hood repeated mysteriously, “She must be killed.”

My heart began to beat violently.

“That’s it,” I faltered out.  “But how?”

“You love her well?”

“I do.”

“Then you must find the heart for that work too.  You must steer her yourself, and I shall see to it that she dies quickly, without leaving as much as a chip behind.”

“Can you?” I murmured, fascinated by the black hood turned immovably over the stern, as if in unlawful communion with that old sea of magicians, slave-dealers, exiles and warriors, the sea of legends and terrors, where the mariners of remote antiquity used to hear the restless shade of an old wanderer weep aloud in the dark.

“I know a rock,” whispered the initiated voice within the hood secretly.  “But—­caution!  It must be done before our men perceive what we are about.  Whom can we trust now?  A knife drawn across the fore halyards would bring the foresail down, and put an end to our liberty in twenty minutes.  And the best of our men may be afraid of drowning.  There is our little boat, but in an affair like this no one can be sure of being saved.”

The voice ceased.  We had started from Barcelona with our dinghy in tow; afterwards it was too risky to try to get her in, so we let her take her chance of the seas at the end of a comfortable scope of rope.  Many times she had seemed to us completely overwhelmed, but soon we would see her bob up again on a wave, apparently as buoyant and whole as ever.