As I entered my berth I caught myself smiling over my fancy of the look that would come into the sweet girl’s face when her maid gave her the message; the brilliant gleam of mingled alarm, temper, astonishment in her eyes, the sudden flush of her cheek and its paleness afterwards, the consternation in the set of her lips and the agitation of her little hands like the fluttering of falling snow-flakes as she dressed. But in good sooth I too was feeling mightily excited once more; I had cooled down somewhat since going on deck and viewing the distant sail from the masthead; now that I was alone and could muse, my pulse rose with my imaginations till it almost came to my thinking of myself as on the eve of some desperate and bloody business, boarding a pirate, say, with the chance of a live slow match in his magazine, or cutting out something heavily armed and full of men under a castle bristling with artillery. Supposing the craft to be the ‘Shark,’ what was to be the issue? The ‘Bride’ would be recognised; and Hope-Kennedy was not likely, as I might take it, to let us float alongside of him if he could help it. Suppose we maimed her and compelled her to bring to; what then? I had asked Finn this question long before, and he had said it would not come to a hand-to-hand struggle. But how could he tell? If we offered to board they might threaten to fire into us, and a single shot, let alone a wounded or a killed man, might raise blood enough to end in as grim an affray as ever British colours floated over. Small wonder that my excitement rose with all these fancies and speculations. And then again, supposing the stranger to be the ‘Shark,’ there was (to me) the astonishing coincidence of falling in with her--picking her up, indeed, as though we had been steered dead into her wake by some spirit hand instead of blundering on her through a stroke of luck, which had no more reference to Finn’s calculations, and suppositions and hopings, than to the indications of the nose of our chaste and gilded figure-head. When I went on deck I spied Wilfrid coming down the forerigging. He held on very tightly and felt about with his sprawling feet with uncommon cautiousness for the ratlines ere relaxing his grip of the shrouds. Finn was immediately under him, standing by, perhaps, to shoulder him up if he should turn dizzy. They reached the deck and came aft. ‘She’s not yet in sight from the cross-trees,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, puffing and irritable from nervousness and exertion and disappointment, ‘and I can’t climb higher.’ ‘If she’s the “Shark,”’ said I, ‘you’re not going to raise her upon the horizon as if she were a beacon. But there’s a spread of wings here that _she_ can’t show anyhow, and it will be strange if her white plumes are not nodding above that blue edge by noon.’