“Are you sufficiently rested, child?”
“Rested?” she echoed on a note of wonder that he should suppose it.
“Poor lamb, poor lamb!” he murmured, as a mother might have done, and drew her towards him, stroking that gleaming auburn head. “We’ll speed us back to England with every stitch of canvas spread. Take heart then, and....”
But she broke in impetuously, drawing away from him as she spoke, and his heart sank with foreboding of the thing she was about to inquire.
“I overheard a sailor just now saying to another that it is your intent to hang Sir Oliver Tressilian out of hand—this morning.”
He misunderstood her utterly. “Be comforted,” he said. “My justice shall be swift; my vengeance sure. The yard-arm is charged already with the rope on which he shall leap to his eternal punishment.”
She caught her breath, and set a hand upon her bosom as if to repress its sudden tumult.
“And upon what grounds,” she asked him with an air of challenge, squarely facing him, “do you intend to do this thing?”
“Upon what grounds?” he faltered. He stared and frowned, bewildered by her question and its tone. “Upon what grounds?” he repeated, foolishly almost in the intensity of his amazement. Then he considered her more closely, and the wildness of her eyes bore to him slowly an explanation of words that at first had seemed beyond explaining.
“I see!” he said in a voice of infinite pity; for the conviction to which he had leapt was that her poor wits were all astray after the horrors through which she had lately travelled. “You must rest,” he said gently, “and give no thought to such matters as these. Leave them to me, and be very sure that I shall avenge you as is due.”