It is an odd fact of human nature that a man may for years possess the knowledge that a certain thing must be of a certain fashion, and yet be shocked to discover through his own senses that the fact is in perfect harmony with his beliefs.  When first, three years ago, at Tortuga he had been urged upon the adventurer’s course which he had followed ever since, he had known in what opinion Arabella Bishop must hold him if he succumbed.  Only the conviction that already she was for ever lost to him, by introducing a certain desperate recklessness into his soul had supplied the final impulse to drive him upon his rover’s course.

That he should ever meet her again had not entered his calculations, had found no place in his dreams.  They were, he conceived, irrevocably and for ever parted.  Yet, in spite of this, in spite even of the persuasion that to her this reflection that was his torment could bring no regrets, he had kept the thought of her ever before him in all those wild years of filibustering.  He had used it as a curb not only upon himself, but also upon those who followed him.  Never had buccaneers been so rigidly held in hand, never had they been so firmly restrained, never so debarred from the excesses of rapine and lust that were usual in their kind as those who sailed with Captain Blood.  It was, you will remember, stipulated in their articles that in these as in other matters they must submit to the commands of their leader.  And because of the singular good fortune which had attended his leadership, he had been able to impose that stern condition of a discipline unknown before among buccaneers.  How would not these men laugh at him now if he were to tell them that this he had done out of respect for a slip of a girl of whom he had fallen romantically enamoured?  How would not that laughter swell if he added that this girl had that day informed him that she did not number thieves and pirates among her acquaintance.

Thief and pirate!

How the words clung, how they stung and burnt his brain!

It did not occur to him, being no psychologist, nor learned in the tortuous workings of the feminine mind, that the fact that she should bestow upon him those epithets in the very moment and circumstance of their meeting was in itself curious.  He did not perceive the problem thus presented; therefore he could not probe it.  Else he might have concluded that if in a moment in which by delivering her from captivity he deserved her gratitude, yet she expressed herself in bitterness, it must be because that bitterness was anterior to the gratitude and deep-seated.  She had been moved to it by hearing of the course he had taken.  Why?  It was what he did not ask himself, or some ray of light might have come to brighten his dark, his utterly evil despondency.  Surely she would never have been so moved had she not cared — had she not felt that in what he did there was a personal wrong to herself.  Surely, he might have reasoned, nothing short of this could have moved her to such a degree of bitterness and scorn as that which she had displayed.