On the after part of the deck of the frigate, screened from the sun by an awning overhead, sat Miss Gillespie and her brother. She, with an air of unmitigated sadness; he, chafing at a captivity which he deemed illegal, and impatient to reach the shore and obtain his freedom. He had never understood for what purpose the soporific incense had been burned, or, boy as he was, he would have attempted the life of their insidious foe. He had imagined that it was an attempt on their lives, (for the disaster of the count had been carefully concealed from them,) and his sister had shrunk from undeceiving him. Her pure nature could itself with difficulty comprehend such baseness, but was absolutely incapable of conveying an idea of it to another, particularly one whose disposition was naturally as unsuspecting as her own. She therefore determined to avoid exciting his suspicions, and even forbore to interfere further than by advice, when the steward, at the instance of his master, now able to sit up, represented that so far from designing injury, the object was to soothe their nerves, those of the lady in especial, after the anxiety and alarm of the evening previous. He also persuaded Frank that the count would exert himself to obtain their speedy liberation when they reached the port; and, that having found them on board of a privateer of the enemy, a class of vessels not in the habit of conveying passengers, he was, by the strict tenor of his orders, bound, although most reluctantly, to detain them. These representations so far operated upon the youth, that he was several times prevailed upon to visit the designing count. But his sister pertinaciously refused to see, or receive any message from her persecutor, and might have departed from her resolution and told Frank sufficient to prevent him from leaving her alone, but that in her fears for Talbot she had forgotten every thing else.