“Are cold and storm and peril sweeter to you, lady, than warmth and safety, and a love that would guard you from, not run you into, danger?” he said in a whisper. “Do you not wish this boat the Santa Teresa, these rude boards the velvet cushions of her state cabin, this darkness her many lights, this cold her warmth, with the night shut out and love shut in?”

His audacity, if it angered me, yet made me laugh. Not so with the King’s ward. She shrank from him until she pressed against the tiller. Our flight, the pursuing feet, the struggle at the wharf, her wounded arm of which she had not told, the terror of the white sail rising as if by magic, the vision of the man she hated lying as one dead before her in the moonlight, the cold, the hurry of the night, — small wonder if her spirit