“Ah, now, can’t ye, indeed?” he cried.  “Sure, then, I’ll be telling ye.”

“Oh, please.”  There was real alarm in her voice.  “I realize fully what you did, and I realize that partly, at least, you may have been urged by consideration for myself.  Believe me, I am very grateful.  I shall always be grateful.”

“But if it’s also your intention always to think of me as a thief and a pirate, faith, ye may keep your gratitude for all the good it’s like to do me.”

A livelier colour crept into her cheeks.  There was a perceptible heave of the slight breast that faintly swelled the flimsy bodice of white silk.  But if she resented his tone and his words, she stifled her resentment.  She realized that perhaps she had, herself, provoked his anger.  She honestly desired to make amends.

“You are mistaken,” she began.  “It isn’t that.”

But they were fated to misunderstand each other.

Jealousy, that troubler of reason, had been over-busy with his wits as it had with hers.

“What is it, then?” quoth he, and added the question:  “Lord Julian?”

She started, and stared at him blankly indignant now.

“Och, be frank with me,” he urged her, unpardonably. “’Twill be a kindness, so it will.”

For a moment she stood before him with quickened breathing, the colour ebbing and flowing in her cheeks.  Then she looked past him, and tilted her chin forward.

“You... you are quite insufferable,” she said.  “I beg that you will let me pass.”

He stepped aside, and with the broad feathered hat which he still held in his hand, he waved her on towards the house.

“I’ll not be detaining you any longer, ma’am.  After all, the cursed thing I did for nothing can be undone.  Ye’ll remember afterwards that it was your hardness drove me.”

She moved to depart, then checked, and faced him again.  It was she now who was on her defence, her voice quivering with indignation.

“You take that tone!  You dare to take that tone!” she cried, astounding him by her sudden vehemence.  “You have the effrontery to upbraid me because I will not take your hands when I know how they are stained; when I know you for a murderer and worse?”

He stared at her open-mouthed.

“A murderer- I?” he said at last.

“Must I name your victims?  Did you not murder Levasseur?”

“Levasseur?” He smiled a little.  “So they’ve told you about that!”

“Do you deny it?”

“I killed him, it is true.  I can remember killing another man in circumstances that were very similar.  That was in Bridgetown on the night of the Spanish raid.  Mary Traill would tell you of it.  She was present.”

He clapped his hat on his head with a certain abrupt fierceness, and strode angrily away, before she could answer or even grasp the full significance of what he had said.