"Will you not contrive to save me?" I said, in conclusion. "I am a Protestant—as much as I ever was. I cannot go to Canada. I only ask a safe asylum. They said I was a French subject because my father was French."
"Plague the French!" said Captain Mayhew. "They shan't keep you. Yes, we'll save you somehow. Never fear. But how?"
He considered a moment, and then his thin, clever face broke into a smile, and he turned to Andrew:
"You say this young lady was promised to you, with the consent of her parents?"
"Yes," answered Andrew. "We might have been married before this but for my own hardness and pig-headed jealousies."
"You were not to blame," said I. "The fault has been all mine."
"Reckon you'll have time to settle that," said the captain. "Well, since all that is so, and you like the young lady and she likes you, why, it appears to me that the best way will be to call the good minister who came over with us, and let him marry you on the spot. Then the lady will be the wife of a British subject, which will make her one herself, I take it; and if old King Lewy don't like it, let him come over himself and see about it."
"It would be much the best way, Vevette," said Andrew, turning to me. "It would give me the right to protect you."
I faltered something, I know not what.
"The long and the short of it is, we will have a wedding on the spot," said the captain. "As to the banns and all that, we can settle it afterward. But we had better be in a hurry, for we are getting into smooth water, and your Mother Mary will be astir presently, making a fuss. Just call Mr. Norton, and tell him to make haste, will you?" he said to the steward. "Or, maybe we had better go into my cabin. Mr. Norton is a regular Church of England minister," he explained to me as he assisted me down the companion-way. "He's going out to see his folks, but he don't calculate to settle."