I hesitated, sadly torn between duty and inclination.  John Paul could, indeed, go to America without me.  Next the thought came over me in a flash that my grandfather might be ill, or even dead, and there would be no one to receive the captain.  I knew he would never consent to spend the season at the Star and Garter at my expense.  And then the image of the man rose before me, of him who had given me all he owned, and gone with me so cheerfully to prison, though he knew me not from the veriest adventurer and impostor.  I was undecided no longer.

“I must go, Jack,” I said sadly; “as God judges, I must.”

He looked at me queerly, as if I were beyond his comprehension, picked up his hat, called out that he would see me in the morning, and was gone.

I went slowly upstairs, threw off my clothes mechanically, and tumbled into bed.  The captain had long been asleep.  By the exertion of all the will power I could command, I was able gradually to think more and more soberly, and the more I thought, the more absurd, impossible, it seemed that I, a rough provincial not yet of age, should possess the heart of a beauty who had but to choose from the best of all England.  An hundred times I went over the scene of poor Comyn’s proposal, nay, saw it vividly, as though the whole of it had been acted before me:  and as I became calmer, the plainer I perceived that Dorothy, thinking me dead, was willing to let Comyn believe that she had loved me, and had so eased the soreness of her refusal.  Perhaps, in truth, a sentiment had sprung up in her breast when she heard of my disappearance, which she mistook for love.  But surely the impulse that sent her to Castle Yard was not the same as that Comyn had depicted:  it was merely the survival of the fancy of a little girl in a grass-stained frock, who had romped on the lawn at Carvel Hall.  I sighed as I remembered the sun and the flowers and the blue Chesapeake, and recalled the very toss of her head when she had said she would marry nothing less than a duke.

Alas, Dolly, perchance it was to be nothing more than a duke!  The bloated face and beady eyes and the broad crooked back I had seen that day in Arlington Street rose before me,—­I should know his Grace of Chartersea again were I to meet him in purgatory.  Was it, indeed, possible that I could prevent her marriage with this man?  I fell asleep, repeating the query, as the dawn was sifting through the blinds.

I awakened late.  Banks was already there to dress me, to congratulate me as discreetly as a well-trained servant should; nor did he remind me of the fact that he had offered to lend me money, for which omission I liked him the better.  In the parlour I found the captain sipping his chocolate and reading his morning Chronicle, as though all his life he had done nothing else.

“Good morning, captain.”  And fetching him a lick on the back that nearly upset his bowl, I cried as heartily as I could: