“We had many happy hours together,” he went on; “she and I, while I was waiting for you.”
“Damn you!” I shouted; “what means this! Know you that----”
“Aye, I know,” was his response, and then he looked me full in the face. He seemed to drop his jaunty, careless air, as, at midnight, a dancer casts aside his mask. “I know,” he repeated slowly. “I know you, and I know Lucille.”
My sword was out in an instant, and, with its point, I menaced his heart. But, with a coolness that I could not help admiring, he never moved, nor did he seem at all alarmed.
“Draw, sir!” I cried out. “Draw, in the devil’s name, or I’ll run you through where you stand! The Governor is not here now to stay our hands. Who are you, crossing my path so often?”
“There is time enough to draw my sword when I have finished,” he replied, never taking his eyes from my face. “So if you will but put up your weapon, perchance there may be no need to take it from the scabbard again, Sir Francis Dane!”
If he had struck me I could not have been more startled than at the sound of that name. My knees grew weak from very fear, and I sank back into my chair, while my sword which I had held outstretched, clattered to the oak floor.
That my secret had been laid bare, after so many years, when I supposed it safely buried across the sea, shook me as a tempest might a sapling.
“Have I touched you with the point?” asked the stranger, as he cut the air with the little whip.
“Yes! A thousand times, yes!” I cried, and I leaped at him, and would have run him through on the instant with my sword, which I recovered from the floor, had he not nimbly sprang behind the bed.