"Some men," he whispered to himself, "would stop here--would be content. Yet I will not stop--will never stop so long as Sophy's face rises before me every night--aye, and rises more plainly as I drink more; so long as there rises, too, the dank, reeking churchyard into which I stole at night--the night after my mother's burial. I will never stop," he continued, as he poured more spirits into the glass; "never. Only--what to do? how to go on? None would believe me now--none. None believed then that I was an innocent man and he the guilty one. None! My mother died with her heart broken, Sophy married the man whom she thought I had tried to rob. Curse him! I will never stop."

Again he emptied the glass of spirits down his throat; yet, fiery as the drams were, they did not make him drunk. Instead, only the more resolute, the more hard, if the set look upon his face was any index to his mind.

"He is ruined," he said to himself now. "Ruined. Still--that is not enough. Yet, how to do more? How! how! Short of murder I cannot slay him. There is no way. And I have sworn to slay him--his soul, if not his body. I have sworn to slay him, and there are no means. None. I shall never stamp on those grinning features; I can do nothing now."

Sitting there, with on one side of him the glass--again empty, and soon again to be refilled--and on the other a guttering rushlight which imparted to his face a sickly, cadaverous appearance, he continued racking his brain as to how more calamity might be made to fall upon Beau Bufton, the man who, if his meditations might be taken as a clue to the past, had once brought terrible ruin to him. He wondered if this man Barry (who was, beyond all doubt, the future husband of the woman, the heiress, whom he and Anne Pottle had contrived to make their tool believe he was himself about to marry) could in any way be used as a means to the end; he pondered this, and then discarded that idea as worthless. "Sir Geoffrey Barry is a gentleman, an officer," he said. "Bufton is now an outcast. It is impossible. Impossible. Barry would not condescend to kick him."

Again he drank--the bottle being almost empty by this time--and still his mind did not become clouded; still he was able to think and plot and scheme. And once he muttered, "He wishes to participate in my new method of earning a living, not even knowing what that method is. Ah!" he exclaimed, springing to his feet and knocking over the miserable rushlight as he did so, whereby he was now in the dark, "he wishes that. He wishes that! Oh, my God!" he cried, gesticulating in that darkness, "he wishes that to be. And so it shall! So it shall! He shall participate. Somehow, I will do it. He shall participate, even as the sheep--which his accursed, gibbering face is something like--participates with the butcher in the shambles to which it is led. He shall indeed participate."

Then, in the darkness, and half-frenzied both with the drink he had already partaken of--which was not the first that day--as well as with the thoughts of a new scheme which had suddenly dawned in his mind, he put out his hand and, groping for the bottle, found it, and drained the last remnants of its contents.

After which he stumbled towards where his bed was and sought oblivion in sleep--an oblivion that, however, was not altogether complete--that was disturbed by dreams and visions of a girl's face, a girl's form shaken with piteous sobs; and, also, of a newly made grave in a country churchyard, on which the rain poured without cessation through the night.

[CHAPTER X.]

"THE MIGNONNE."

Eight months had passed; March of the year 1759 had come, and a bitterly cold east wind blew up Bugsby's Reach, causing the pennons on countless barges and frigates and brigs, to say nothing of great ships of war lying in that classic piece of water, to stream out like pointing fingers towards where, above all else, there glistened in the wintry afternoon sunlight the cross surmounting St. Paul's. It whistled, too, through the shrouds of a French-built frigate, one that in earlier days would have been spoken of as "a tall, rakehelly bark," a fabric that was beautiful in all her lines, in her yacht-like bows and rounded stern, in her lofty masts, stayed with supreme precision; in her shining afterdeck brasswork, her wheel carved and decorated as though the hands of dead-and-gone Grinling Gibbons might have been at work at it; upon, too, her brass capstan and binnacle. A French frigate pierced also with gun ports below, and bearing for her figurehead the face and bust of a smiling, blue-eyed child, which figurehead represented the name she bore upon her bows, Mignonne.