"Indifferently, señor."
"Well, I'll teach it you. The lesson may as well begin now. Say after me, 'Harry'—I permit that though I am a belted knight of England, made so by His Merry Majesty, King Charles, God rest him. Drink to the repose of the king!" he cried, shoving a cup across the table toward her.
Resisting a powerful temptation to throw it at him, and divining that the stimulant might be of assistance to her in the trying crisis in which she found herself, the girl lifted the cup to her lips, bowed to him, and swallowed a portion of the contents.
"Give it back to me!" he shouted. "You have tasted it, I drain it. Now the lesson. Say after me, 'Harry Morgan'——"
"Harry Morgan," gasped the girl.
"'I love thee.'"
With a swift inward prayer she uttered the lying words.
"You have learned well, and art an apt pupil indeed," he cried, leering upon her in approbation and lustful desire—- his very gaze was pollution to her. "D'ye know there are few women who can resist me when I try to be agreeable? Harry Morgan's way!" he laughed again. "There be some that I have won and many I have forced. None like you. So you love me? Scuttle me, I thought so. Ben Hornigold was right. Woo a woman, let her be clipped willingly in arms—yet there's a pleasure in breaking in the jades, after all. Still, I'm glad that you are in a better mood and have forgot that cursed Spaniard rotting in the dungeons below, in favor of a better man, Harry—no, I'll say, Sir Henry—Morgan—on this occasion, at your service," he cried, rising again and bowing to her as before.
She looked desperately at the clock. The hour was close at hand. So great was the strain under which she was laboring that she felt she could not continue five minutes longer. Would Alvarado never come? Would anybody come? She sat motionless and white as marble, while the chieftain stared at her in the pauses of his monologue.
"Now, madam, since you have spoke the words perhaps you will further wipe out the recollection of this caress—" he pointed to his cheek again. "Curse me!" he cried in sudden heat, "you are the only human being that ever struck Harry Morgan on the face and lived to see the mark. I'd thought to wait until to-morrow and fetch some starveling priest to play his mummery, but why do so? We are alone here—together. There is none to disturb us. Black Dog watches. You love me, do you not?"