“No, no, I would have you my best of men,” yielded Lady Bell, with a great sob; “but I doubt my heart is broke, for I cannot follow you into danger, and if—if——” She failed in framing the conclusion, that the man she loved, and who had just told her his love, standing there in his flower of youth, health, and strength, might ere long fall on the deck, slippery with blood, never to rise again, or sink in the trough of an engulphing wave, and be washed far beyond the ken of friend or foe. Lady Bell broke into piteous tears. She had been, as she said, so lonely a young creature, constrained, in the measure, to be self-sufficing, till she had found a friend, and then a love. He had taught her in the shortest space to be prouder of his love than of all else belonging to her. She had been right willing to lay down for him her pride of birth and beauty and a belle’s worldly expectations. She had consented gladly to resign that belleship, to affront the great world, and, as an anti-climax after her triumphs, to make a poor love marriage. But it was all in vain. No such voluntary offering was required of her. Her new-found love was snatched from her. Her life was emptied of its fulness at the fullest, just when she had begun to know how rich and rapturous life might be. “Would it have been a relief to you,” asked Captain Fane slowly, “though I would never have consented to your facing hardship (‘fore George, to think of my Lady Bell being exposed for me!)—if all this had occurred months earlier, and in the interval we had braved the cold displeasure, or the hot wrath, of friends, and were wed, man and wife, whom no man, nothing save death, could put asunder? Would it have made a difference if you could have gone out with me, as some of the civil authorities, Mr. Eden and others—ay, some of the officers too, have carried out their wives?” “Oh, Harry, it would have been heaven compared to this!” Lady Bell assured him fervently. “What!” he cried, half with tender wonder, half covetous to have the fond assurance repeated, “you would cross the seas, and rough it among rough sailors on board ship, and you so young and dainty. You would dwell among strangers, many of them hostile—some say with a good cause, but it is too late to do aught but fight its righteousness or unrighteousness now—and we sailors might be called on to help to take stores up the country, while we were dependent on the fidelity of our barbarous allies, the Indians. You were never in a foreign country. You never even tried living on board ship.” “Never, never,” corroborated Lady Bell, so heartily, that there was something like cheerfulness in her tone. “But I should be with you, and what would I mind besides? Do you think I am a coward, sir, or a peevish woman, fit for nothing but to miss my comforts, and make a moan? Don’t call the sailors rough, when you are a sailor.” “Then I am delivered from a very great temptation,” admitted Harry Fane honestly.