"Sure, I never met the like of him," she said at last. "He puts me in mind of the grand gentry the padre brings to see me in Madrid—and him a pirate! Glory, what a tale I could be telling the girls if I ever see the four walls of St. Bridget's again! Whiles I talk with him he makes me feel there's none other so grand and fine in the broad world. And again I'll remember the screaming on the Santissima Trinidad and what Frey Sebastian said of him—and then the shivers turn me winter-cold. But I'm thinking yourself will be the same queer sort, Master Ormerod, you that can be generous and gallant to a foolish maid and as cruel as the wildcat the Indians showed us in the hills up behind Porto Bello."
"It must seem so to you," I answered. "But the truth is that I am as much the sport of Fate as yourself."
"Do you tell me so?" she replied politely.
"I do," I said with energy. "Let me tell you the whole story—it begins on the night I accompanied you to the Whale's Head——"
"Ah, that was a night of nights!" she exclaimed. "The first breath of adventure ever I drew, and I was thinking to myself as I hugged the memory afterwards I could never get enough of that same savor. But yesterday was the curing of my hunger."
And her blue eyes clouded with tears and the corners of her mouth quirked downward most dolefully.
"Do but let me tell you my story," I pleaded, "and you will think better of that night and maybe of some things that happened afterward."
"Why, sir," she said, "here are you with a ready tongue, and me with two ears wide open. There's naught to stop you. But as to believing—that will be a story for me to tell and you to hear."
So I began at the beginning and told her all from the moment Darby McGraw had run into the counting-room in Pearl Street—and how remote in time and place that seemed as we stared out upon the blue-green rollers of the Caribbean and the tropic sun warmed toward its noon intensity! She listened with mounting interest, never interrupting save for an occasional "Glory!" "Oh, blessed saints!" "Holy Virgin, can such things be!" But when I came to the escape from the Walrus she broke in upon me.
"And you did that to be handy by if I had need of you! Oh, sir, forget the wicked suspicions I owned! 'Tis a true friend you will be—and the large gentleman, too. What is he called? Master Corlaer? Alas, I am heavy in your debt, and always shall be. But the only payment I ever can make will be just my bare thanks and the prayers I'll say on my bended knees my life long."