He started, as the idea recurred to him, and at first he wondered what train of thought could have brought back those words in connection with Theresa’s image. But, as he grew accustomed to his own thought, it became, as it were, the father to the wish; and he began to consider how pretty and gentle she was, and how delicate her slight, rounded figure, and how soft and low her voice. Then he remembered that she had looked at him twice or thrice during the day, with an expression which he had never seen in a woman’s eye before, and which, though he understood it not, did not bode ill to his success; and lastly, the worst, bitterest thought of all arose in his mind, and retained possession of it. “I will spite them all,” he thought, “that proud, insolent young sailor, who, because he is a few years older than I, and has seen swords drawn once or twice—for all, I doubt if he can fence or shoot any better than I, or if he be a whit more active—affects to look down upon me as a stripling. His young friend, truly! let him look out, whether he have not cause to term me something else ere he die. By God! I believe he loves the girl, too! he looked black as a thunder-cloud over Dartmoor, when she smiled on me! And my father—by my soul! I think he’s doting; and her dainty ladyship, too! I’ll see if I cannot have her more eager to hear me, than she has shown herself to-day. I will do it—I will, by all that’s holy! Heaven! how it will spite them!” Then he laid his head down on the pillow, and began to reflect how he should act, and what were his chances of success in the villainy which he meditated; and he even asked himself, with something of the boy’s diffidence in his first encounter with woman, “but can I, can I win her affection?” and vanity and the peculiar audacity of his race, of his own character, made answer instantly, “Ay, can I? Am I not handsomer, and cleverer, and more courtly; am I not higher born and higher bred, and higher mannered, not only than that seafaring lout, but than any one she has ever met withal? Ay, can I, and ay, will I!” And in obedience to this last and base resolve, the worst and barest that ever had crossed the boy’s mind, no sooner had they returned from the adjoining room, after the conclusion of the evening meal, than he contrived entirely to monopolize Theresa.