as well as the folly, of holding out.  On the one side is a life wasted here, on the other you will be the wife of a man who loves you above all things; who has risked everything by the step that he has taken, and who, when you consent, will devote his life to your happiness.  You will be restored to your friends and to your position, and nought will be known, except that we made a runaway match, as many have done before us.  Do not answer now.  At any rate I will remain here for a couple of months, and by the end of that time you may see that the alternative is not so terrible a one.’

“Then, without another word, he turned and walked away; and nothing further passed between us until in the afternoon, when you so suddenly arrived.”

“Thank God, he behaved better than I should have given him credit for,” Frank said, when she had finished.  “He must have felt absolutely certain that there was no chance whatever of your rescue, and that in time you would be forced to accept him, or he would hardly have refrained from pushing his suit more urgently.  His calculations were well made, and if we had not noticed that brigantine at Cowes, and I had not had the luck to come upon some of his crew and pick up his track, he might have been successful.”

“You don’t think that I should ever have consented to marry him?” Bertha said, indignantly.

“I am sure that such a thought never entered your head, Bertha; but you cannot tell what the effect of a hopeless captivity would have had upon you.  The fellow had judged you well, and he saw that the attitude of respect he adopted would afford him a far better chance of winning you, than roughness or threats would do.  But he might have resorted to them afterwards, and you were so wholly and absolutely in his power, that you would almost have been driven to accept the alternative and become his wife.”

She shook her head decidedly.

“I would have killed him first,” she said.  “I suppose some girls would say, ‘I would have killed myself;’ but I should not have thought of that—­at any rate not until I had failed to kill him.  Every woman has the same right to defend herself that a man has, and I should have no more felt that I was to blame, if I had killed him, than you would do when you killed a man who had done you no individual harm, in battle.”

“We only want mamma here,” she said a little later, as she took her seat in a deck chair, “to complete the illusion that we are sailing along somewhere on the Devonshire coast.  The hills are higher and more wooded, but the general idea is the same.  I suppose I ought to feel it very shocking, cruising about with you, without anyone but Anna with me; but somehow it does not feel so.”

“No wonder, dear.  You see, we have been looking forward to doing exactly the same thing in the spring.”

“I think we had better not talk about that now,” she said, flushing.  “I intend to make believe, till we get to England, that mamma is down below, and that I may be called at any moment.  How long shall we be before we are there?”