"Perhaps you don't believe me when I say he is a tyrant?"
"Hum," said Barnabas.
"You don't, do you?"
"Why, I'm afraid not," he admitted.
"I'm nineteen!" said she, standing very erect.
"I should have judged you a little older," said Barnabas.
"So I am—in mind, and—and experience. Yet here I live, prisoned in a dreary old house, and with nothing to see but trees, and toads, and cows and cabbages; and I'm watched over, and tended from morning till night, and am the subject of more councils of war than Buonaparte's army ever was."
"What do you mean by councils of war?"
"Oh! whenever I do anything my tyrant disapproves of, he retires to what he calls the 'round house,' summons the Bo'sun, and they argue and talk over me as though I were a hostile fleet, and march up and down forming plans of attack and defence, till I burst in on them, and then—and then—Oh! there are many kinds of tyrants, and he is one. And so to-night I left him; I ran away to meet—" She stopped suddenly, and her head drooped, and Barnabas saw her white hands clench themselves.
"Your brother," said he.