He marched up and down in a sort of passion.  “Don’t let me see you weep for him!  It makes me ready to strangle him with my own hands!”

A shout of ‘Pilpignon!’ at the door here carried him off, leaving Anne to give free course to the tears that she had hitherto been able to restrain, feeling the need of self-possession.  She had very little hope, since her affection for Charles Archfield seemed only to give the additional sting of jealousy, ‘cruel as the grave,’ to the vindictive temper Peregrine already nourished, and which certainly came from his evil spirit.  She shed many tears, and sobbed unrestrainingly till the Bretonne came and patted her shoulder, and said, “Pauvre, pauvre!” And even Hans looked in, saying, “Missee Nana no cry, Massa Perry great herr—­very goot.”

She tried to compose herself, and think over alternatives to lay before Peregrine.  He might let her go, and carry to Sir Edmund Nutley letters to which his father would willingly swear, while he was out of danger in Normandy.  Or if this was far beyond what could be hoped for, surely he could despatch a letter to his father, and for such a price she must sacrifice herself, though it cost her anguish unspeakable to call up the thought of Charles, of little Philip, of her uncle, and the old people, who loved her so well, all forsaken, and with what a life in store for her!  For she had not the slightest confidence in the power of her influence, whatever Peregrine might say and sincerely believe at present.  If there were, more palpably than with all other human beings, angels of good and evil contending for him, swaying him now this way and now that; it was plain from his whole history that nothing had yet availed to keep him under the better influence for long together; and she believed that if he gained herself by these unjust and cruel means the worse spirit would thereby gain the most absolute advantage.  If her heart had been free, and she could have loved him, she might have hoped, though it would have been a wild and forlorn hope; but as it was, she had never entirely surmounted a repulsion from him, as something strange and unnatural, a feeling involving fear, though here he was her only hope and protector, and an utter uncertainty as to what he might do.  She could only hope that she might pine away and die quickly, and perhaps Charles Archfield might know at last that it had been for his sake.  And would it be in her power to make even such terms as these?

How long she wept and prayed and tried to ’commit her way unto the Lord’ she did not know, but light seemed to be making its way far more than previously through the shutters closed against the storm when Peregrine returned.

“You will not be greatly troubled with those fellows to-day,” he said; “there’s a vessel come on the rocks at Chale, and every man and mother’s son is gone after it.”  So saying he unfastened the shutters and let in a flood of sunshine.  “You would like a little air,” he said; “’tis all quiet now, and the tide is going down.”