“Nay, sir, not so fast. You forget the wine; it is there.” She pointed to a heavy sideboard of black oak near the wall, at the same time taking a silver flagon from the table. “Ah, the golden wine!” He went to the sideboard, and, kneeling with his back toward her, thrust a hand across the shelf of a lower cupboard. Finding a dusty bottle in the corner, he withdrew it. “’Tis as old,” he said, closing the doors and surveying the film of cobwebs, “as old as our love is new. Come, dearest—” but, on turning, he broke off suddenly. The flash of a white ruff, the soft whisper of slippers across a rug, and he was alone—a prisoner. But then—even then, as the key grated in the lock—he laughed like a boy who has been caught in a game of blind-man’s-buff or hide-and-seek. Even in the first moment of his plight, amusement and an uncontrollable sense of the ludicrous sparkled in his blue eyes. Impulsively knocking off the bottle’s neck against the sideboard, he picked up a silver cup which had rolled to his feet from the cabin door and filled it to the brim. “You remembered me,” he reflected, sipping the wine with a too-apparent relish as though acting to himself. “You remembered me. That is one point gained.” In the meanwhile, Eleanor Dare, on the deck, was graciously explaining to Dyonis her apparent unreasonableness and breach of discipline. “You will guard the door until relieved.” And so saying, she returned in her barge to the shore. Early in the evening, Vytal, re-entering the town, was surprised to find her evidently awaiting him at the fort. “The man,” she exclaimed, breathlessly, without any prelude of greeting, “the man you fought with on the bridge is here!” “Frazer?” “Yes, Frazer, known lately as Ralph Contempt.” A sharp, sudden comprehension, all the keener for having been so long deferred, sprang into the soldier’s face. “’Twas to set him a-land that the Spanish vessel anchored to the southward. I knew the boy’s eyes. ’Twas his heavy beard deceived me.” She smiled. “A woman knows from the heart,” she said, “while a man’s head aches with perplexity. And, besides, whereas he only fought with you, me he insulted.” Her cheeks flushed, her eyes revealing the pure hatred and anger they had so long been forced to mask with smiles. The look fired Vytal’s blood. But, following his first silent fury, an expression which had never yet been in his eyes changed them to those of a wounded animal, and he seemed for the moment almost ashamed. The thought had cut him cruelly that his worst enemies on earth were a mere careless stripling and a shallow drunkard, with not even the boy’s bravery to commend him as a foe. There are a few men who regret the lack of noble power in an enemy as deeply as the many deplore its non-existence in a friend. “Where is he?” “I have imprisoned him in the _Admiral_.” “You!”