She allowed her eyes to linger upon his whilst she pronounced these closing words.
'All the chances will be upon our side,' said he, speaking with boyish delight, since he seemed to find a sympathy kindling in the girl with his scheme. 'The only risks I run will be from my own men. I believe I shall be easily able to overcome that difficulty.'
'You will have to confess your business to them,' she said.
'Certainly,' he answered. 'But none yet suspect it. A tall merchant ship unarmed, well laden with goods of which I shall have received notice, sails very stately out of the port, say, of Lisbon. She has a barrel or two of money in her lazarette for the planters of the Portuguese settlements. She has forty men before the mast, and twenty in officers and idlers abaft it. Presently a white gleam is seen by the light of the moon. No notice is taken. Why should notice be taken? There are no pirates in those western seas so close aboard the coast. I wear, or tack ship, run my brig alongside, and board her, whilst half her people are asleep below.'
Ada smiled whilst she listened to her lover's repetition of the fantastic sketch she herself had drawn at her father's breakfast-table.
'We batten everybody down, leaving one to liberate the people after, then search for our needs, send the booty over the side into the brig, and sail away, Ada—and sail away, my love, a rich, unknown ship. What can they call us? How can the terrified dagos describe us? A British crew won't stop for an enemy to look. She is a brig. They will know that; but should she leave port again, she will be a brigantine. What could they report? And what do you think of my scheme?'
'It is bold, possible, and dishonourable,' she said, with a subtle note of triumph in her voice, and the same high, encouraging colour of sympathy in her face.
'It is not dishonourable,' said he calmly, 'for an Englishman to rob a foreigner upon the seas where the Englishman has himself been most atrociously looted by most of the nations you can name. I must live by a dishonourable income or die by my own hand.'
He made a step to her, and taking her cheeks, gently lifted her face to his, and said—
'My life is now in your hands. I have confessed all to the woman I love, have ever loved, shall ever love. Knowing my scheme, Ada, will you be my wife?'