Captain Bramble took good care that his prisoner and rival should have no degree of intercourse with her whom he knew very well Captain Ratlin loved.  Under pretence that he feared his prisoner would attempt to escape, he kept him under close guard, and did not permit him once upon deck during the entire trip from the factory of Don Leonardo to the harbor of Sierra Leone.  This chafed the young commander’s spirit somewhat, but yet he was of too true a spirit to sink under oppression; he was brave and cheerful always.  Of course, Miss Huntington saw and understood all this, and the more heartily despised the English officer for the part he played in the unmanly business.

Maud kept by herself.  She felt miserable, and as is often the case, realized that the success of her treachery, thus far, which, in her anticipation, had promised so much, had but still more deeply shadowed her heart.  The English officer looked upon her with mingled feelings of admiration for her strange beauty, with contempt for her treachery, and with a thought that she might be made perhaps the subject of his pleasure by a little management by-and-by.  It was natural for a heart so vile as his to couple every circumstance and connection in some such selfish spirit with himself; it was like him.

“Maud,” he said to her, one day.

“Well,” she answered, lifting her handsome face from her hands, where she often hid it.

“You have lost one lover?”

The girl only answered by a flashing glance of contempt.

“How would you like another?”

“Who?” she said, sternly.

“Me!” answered Captain Bramble.

“You!” she said, contemptuously, and with so much expression as to end the conversation.

No, he had not rightly understood the Quadroon; it was not wounded pride, that sentiment so easily healed when once bruised in the heart of a woman; it was not that which moved the laughter of the Spanish slaver—­it was either love, or something very like it, turned to actual hate, and the native power of her bosom for revenge seemed to be now the food upon which she sustained life itself.  Taking her lonely place in the cabin, after the conversation just referred to, she again hid her face in her hands, and remained with her head bowed in her lap for a long, long while, half dreaming, half waking.  Poor, untutored, uncivilized child of nature! she was very, very unhappy now.

CHAPTER XIII.

The trial.

At the immediate time of which we now write, there had been some very aggravated instances of open resistance to the English and American cruisers on the African station by the slavers who thronged the coast, and the home government had sent out orders embracing extraordinary powers, in order that the first cases that might thenceforth come under the cognizance of the court might lead to such summary treatment of the offenders, as to act as an example for the rest, and thus have a most salutary effect upon the people thus engaged.  It was under these circumstances that Captain Will Ratlin found himself arraigned before the maritime commission at Sierra Leone, with a pretty hard case made out against him at the outset of affairs.