The lady looked at him for a moment or two with the eyes of a tiger. If she had had a striped or spotted skin upon her back one would have expected her to spring at his throat the next minute, but she had acquired a habit of commanding her passions to a certain point, beyond which, they indeed became totally ungovernable, but which was not yet attained; and she contented herself with giving Captain Moreton one of those _coups de patte_ with which she sometimes treated him. "So, Moreton," she said, "you think that you can go away and leave me to take care of myself, as you did some time ago; but you are mistaken, my good friend. I have become wiser now, and I certainly shall not suffer you." "How will you stop me?" asked her companion, turning sharply upon her. "As to stopping you," she replied, with a sneer, "I do not know that I can. You are a strong man and I am a weak woman, and in a tussle you would get the better; but I could bring you back, Moreton, you know, if I did not stop you." "How?" demanded he again, looking fiercely at her. "By a magistrate's warrant, and half a dozen constables," answered the lady. "You do not think I have had so much experience of your amiable ways for nothing, or that I have not taken care to have proofs of a good many little things that would make you very secure in any country but America--that dear land of liberty, where fraud and felony find refuge and protection." "Do you mean to say that you would destroy me, woman?" exclaimed Captain Moreton. "Not exactly destroy you," replied his fair companion, "though you would make a fine criminal under the beam. I have not seen an execution for I do not know how long, and it is a fine sight, after all--better than all the tragedies that ever were written. It is no fun seeing men kill each other in jest: one knows that they come to life again as soon as the curtain falls; but once hanging over the drop, or lying on the guillotine, there's no coming to life any more. I should like to see you hanged, Moreton, when you are hanged. You would hang very well, I dare say." She spoke in the quietest, most sugary tone possible, with a slight smile upon her lip, and amused herself while she did so in sketching with the pen and ink a man under a beam with a noose round his neck. Captain Moreton gazed at her meanwhile with his teeth hard shut, and not the most placable countenance in the world, as she brought vividly up before his imagination all those things which crime is too much accustomed and too willing to forget. "And you, Charlotte, you would do this!" he exclaimed, at length: "but it is all nonsense; and how you ever can talk of such things I cannot imagine, when I merely spoke of going myself and leaving you for a short time, for your own good."