“If you do, madam” (this was spoken in a harder tone), “it were wise for you to try them less severely, than by wandering down towards the beach on the very night that you know his most deadly enemies are lying in wait to slay him, plunder his house, and most probably to carry you off from him.”

“Carry me off?  I will die first!”

“Who can prove that to him?  Appearances are at least against you.”

“My love to him, and his trust for me, sir!”

“His trust?  Have you forgotten, madam, what passed last week, and why he sailed yesterday?”

The only answer was a burst of tears.  Eustace stood watching her with a terrible eye; but they could see his face writhing in the moonlight.

“Oh!” sobbed she at last.  “And if I have been imprudent, was it not natural to wish to look once more upon an English ship?  Are you not English as well as I?  Have you no longing recollections of the dear old land at home?”

Eustace was silent; but his face worked more fiercely than ever.

“How can he ever know it?”

“Why should he not know it?”

“Ah!” she burst out passionately, “why not, indeed, while you are here?  You, sir, the tempter, you the eavesdropper, you the sunderer of loving hearts!  You, serpent, who found our home a paradise, and see it now a hell!”

“Do you dare to accuse me thus, madam, without a shadow of evidence?”

“Dare?  I dare anything, for I know all!  I have watched you, sir, and I have borne with you too long.”

“Me, madam, whose only sin towards you, as you should know by now, is to have loved you too well?  Rose!  Rose! have you not blighted my life for me—­broken my heart?  And how have I repaid you?  How but by sacrificing myself to seek you over land and sea, that I might complete your conversion to the bosom of that Church where a Virgin Mother stands stretching forth soft arms to embrace her wandering daughter, and cries to you all day long, ’Come unto me, ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest!’ And this is my reward!”

“Depart with your Virgin Mother, sir, and tempt me no more!  You have asked me what I dare; and I dare this, upon my own ground, and in my own garden, I, Donna Rosa de Soto, to bid you leave this place now and forever, after having insulted me by talking of your love, and tempted me to give up that faith which my husband promised me he would respect and protect.  Go, sir!”

The brothers listened breathless with surprise as much as with rage.  Love and conscience, and perhaps, too, the pride of her lofty alliance, had converted the once gentle and dreamy Rose into a very Roxana; but it was only the impulse of a moment.  The words had hardly passed her lips, when, terrified at what she had said, she burst into a fresh flood of tears; while Eustace answered calmly: 

“I go, madam:  but how know you that I may not have orders, and that, after your last strange speech, my conscience may compel me to obey those orders, to take you with me?”