When she looked up at him again it was with clear, level, unflinching eyes.
“Monsieur—” she began, haltingly.
But he held up his hand. “I had hoped to have withdrawn ere this upon my own ship and to have left you.”
“Thank God that you did not. I would atone to you for many things. Could you have deserted us? You owe me a greater debt of humiliation and abasement than you can ever hope to pay. But would you abandon us to that crew of demons below! Ah,” she shuddered; “it is a vengeance worthy of the name.”
“Madame, the sparks of such hatred as that you bear for me are best unfed to flame. You shall be adequately guarded upon the San Isidro. But before dawn I and my ship will have sailed—”
“No, no,” she broke in. “You must not. You cannot leave—”
The woman in her rebelled at the thought that he could find it possible to do what he promised.
“Must and can are strong words.” He smiled coldly. “There is no must or can upon the San Isidro but mine. The convenances of St. James’s Square are not those of the Spanish Main, madame.”
But the evil she had wrought in this man’s life, though she had wrought it unconsciously, gave her a new humility. She had done and dared much already. She would not go back.
“I pray you, monsieur, in the name of that mother you once swore by—in the name of all the things you hold most holy—I pray that you will heed my prayer. Take, at least, the Señorita de Batteville upon your vessel. Take us from the faces of the men at the cabin door who leer and grin at us with a too horrid import.”