An expression of deep grief rested on the widow’s countenance as she replied, in a sad voice;

“I know that you may trust Gascoyne with your child.  He is my oldest friend.  I have known him since we were children.  He saved my father’s life long, long ago, and helped to support my mother in her last years.  Would you have me to forget all this because men say that he is a pirate?”

“Why, mother,” cried Henry, “if you know so much about him you must know that, whatever he was in time past, he is the pirate Durward now.”

“I do not know that he is the pirate Durward!” said the widow, in a voice and with a look so decided that Henry was silenced and sorely perplexed; yet much relieved, for he knew that his mother would rather die than tell a deliberate falsehood.

The missionary was also comforted; for although his judgment told him that the grounds of hope thus held out to him were very insufficient, he was impressed by the thoroughly confident tone of the widow, and felt relieved in spite of himself.

Soon after this conversation was concluded, the household retired to rest.

Next morning Henry was awakened out of a deep sleep by the sound of subdued voices in the room underneath his own.  At first he paid no attention to these, supposing that, as it was broad daylight, some of their native servants were moving about.  But presently the sound of his mother’s voice induced him to listen more attentively.  Then a voice replied, so low that he could with difficulty hear it at all.  Its strength increased, however, and at last it broke forth in deep bass tones.

Henry sprang up and threw on his clothes.  As he was thus engaged the front door of the opened, and the speakers went out.  A few seconds sufficed for the youth to finish dressing him; then, seizing a pistol, he hurried out of the house.  Looking quickly round, he just caught sight of the skirts of a woman’s dress as they disappeared through the doorway of a hut which had been formerly inhabited by a poor native, who had subsisted on the widow’s bounty until he died.  The door was shut immediately after.

Going swiftly but cautiously round by a back way, Henry approached the hut.  Strange and conflicting feelings filled his breast.  A blush of deep shame and self-abhorrence mantled on his cheek when it flashed across him that he was about to play the spy on his own mother.  But there was no mistaking Gascoyne’s voice.

How the supposed pirate had got there, and wherefore he was there, were matters that he did not think of or care about at that moment.  There he was; so the young man resolved to secure him and hand him over to justice.

Henry was too honorable to listen secretly to a conversation, whatever it might be, that was not intended for his ears.  He resolved merely to peep in at one of the many chinks in the log but for one moment, to satisfy himself that Gascoyne really was there, and to observe his position.  But as the latter now thought himself beyond the hearing of any one, he spoke in unguarded tones, and Henry heard a few words in spite of himself.