He seized her hand and drew her down beside him.  For an instant she would have resisted, as the sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks attested,—­and then, with the instinctive feminine baseness that compels every woman, when once she has met her master, she submitted.

“I am sorry, if you are offended,” said he.  “But the captain cannot attend to you now, and it is necessary to be guarded in movement; for a slight thing on such occasions may produce a panic.”

“You should not have forced me to sit,” said she, in a smothered voice, without heeding him; “you had no right.”

“This right, that I assume the care of you.”

“Monsieur, you see that I am quite competent to the care of myself.”

“Marguerite, I see that you are determined to quarrel.”

She paused a moment, ere replying; then drew a little nearer and turned her face toward him, though without looking up.

“Forgive me, then!” said she.  “But I would rather be naughty and froward, it lets me stay a child, and so you can take me in keeping, and I need not think for myself at all.  But if I act like a woman grown, then comes all the responsibility, and I must rely on myself, which is such trouble now, though I never felt it so before,—­I don’t know why.  Don’t you see?” And she glanced at him with her head on one side, and laughing archly.

“You were right,” he replied, after surveying her a moment; “my proffered protection is entirely superfluous.”

She thought he was about to go, and placed her hand on his, as it lay along the side.  “Don’t leave me,” she murmured.

“I have no intention of leaving you,” he said.

“You are very good.  I have never seen one like you.  I love you well.”  And, bathed in moonlight, she raised her face and her glowing lips toward him.

Mr. Raleigh gazed in the innocent eyes a moment, to seek the extent of her meaning, and felt, that, should he take advantage of her childlike forgetfulness, he would be only reenacting the part he had so much condemned in one man years before.  So he merely bent low over the hand that lay in his, raised it, and touched his lips to that.  In an instant the color suffused her face, she snatched the hand away, half rose trembling from her seat, then sank into it again.

“Soit, Monsieur!” she exclaimed, abruptly.  “But you have not told me the danger.”

“It will not alarm you now?” he replied, laughing.

“I have said that I am not a coward.”

“I wonder what you would think of me when I say that without doubt I am.”

“You, Mr. Raleigh?” she cried, astonishment banishing anger.

“Not that I betray myself.  But I have felt the true heart-sinking.  Once, surprised in the centre of an insurrection, I expected to find my hair white as snow, if I escaped.”

“Your hair is very black.  And you escaped?”

“So it would appear.”