She lifted her head, and their eyes met frankly.

“I am not afraid,” she protested.  “Not physically, at least.  Truly I have not felt fear since you joined me, Captain West.  Before that I was alone, and was frightened because I could not in the least understand why I was being held a prisoner, or what my fate was to be.  Now all I must meet is the danger of the sea, with you to share the peril with me.”

“But you are very tired?”

“Perhaps so, yet I have not thought about that.  There are other things; you do not believe in me.”

“Why say that?” he asked, in astonishment.  “There is no question of the kind between us now.”

“Truly, is there not?  There has been, however; I know from the way you spoke.  What was it you believed of me—­that—­that I was part of this conspiracy?”

“I do not know what I believed, if I actually believed anything, Miss Natalie,” he explained rather lamely.  “I cannot make the situation altogether clear even to myself.  You see I kept meeting and talking with you—­or I thought I did—­and yet never found you to be the same.  I was all at sea, unable to get anything straight.  One moment I was convinced of your innocence; the next something occurred to make you appear guilty, a co-conspirator with Jim Hobart.  Under the circumstances, you cannot condemn me justly.”

“Condemn!  I do not.  How could I?  You must have kept faith in me nevertheless, or you would never be here now.  That is what seems marvellous to me—­that you actually cared enough to believe.”

“I realize now that I have,” he said gravely.  “Through it all I have kept a very large measure of faith in you.”

“Why should that faith have survived?” she questioned persistently, as though doubt would not wholly leave her mind, “we had no time to really know each other; only a few hours at the most, and even then you must have deemed me a strange girl to ask of you what I did.  Surely there was never a madder story told than the one I told you, and I couldn’t have proven an item of it.”

“Yet it has shown itself true,” he interrupted.

“You actually believe then that there is another woman—­a counterfeit of myself?”

“It is the only theory feasible; you have convinced me of that.”

“Yet this does not answer my question altogether.  You are convinced now, perhaps, because you accept my word, but how have you kept faith in me when you believed just as strongly that it was actually I who met and talked with you?  I who was playing in the game with the man Hobart?”

“Will you believe what I say?”

“Implicitly.”

“Perhaps it sounds like a fairy tale,” he spoke frankly, his eyes seeking her own, all their surroundings forgotten in the eagerness of the moment, “but I will tell you the exact truth.  Before this misunderstanding occurred you had confided in me, trusted me, although I was a stranger and I believed absolutely in your story.  I had that basis to rest on.  In addition to this, those few hours I passed at ‘Fairlawn’ served to confirm my faith.  I got hold of various odds and ends of evidence which convinced me that something was wrong—­that you were actually being conspired against.  I even gained a suspicion that Percival Coolidge was the actual leader of the conspiracy.”