"I thank you for this gracious assurance," he said, in a voice deep with feeling, with eyes which looked humid as they reposed upon her, and with a faint smile like the first illumination of the face by a dawning happiness.
"Did you act the part of a madwoman?" said Captain Acton.
"Yes, papa. When I found myself his prisoner and at his mercy I quickly thought over what I should do to rescue myself. I understood, first of all, that I must disgust him if possible." Captain Acton and Sir William exchanged a look at this stroke of naiveté and lightly smiled. "How was I to disgust him?" continued the beautiful young creature. "I made up my mind to pretend to be mad."
"And you are so fine an actress as to have been able to persuade so intelligent a man that you were actually mad?" enquired Captain Acton with some astonishment.
"I was determined to try. I could see no other way of frightening and disgusting him."
"The spirit of her mother came to her aid," said the Admiral, who had heard much of the genius of Kitty O'Hara.
"Ha!" exclaimed Captain Acton, looking fondly at his child, "I don't doubt it is in you. But you have suffered it to rest as an unsuspected quality."
"And you made Mr Lawrence afraid of you?" said Sir William.
She answered by relating the story of some of those freaks with which the reader has been made acquainted; she described other acts of madness which had taxed her imagination to devise. She was mad to all who spoke to her because, as she justly said, "it would have been ridiculous for me to have been mad to the Captain and sane to everybody else in the ship."