“But the point is that it would have been no earthly good for you two,” continued Sebright. “That’s the point I made. If O’Brien knows anything, he knows you are on board this ship. He reckons on it as a dead certainty. Now, it is very evident that we could refuse to give _you_ up, Mr. Kemp, and that the admiral (if the flagship’s off Havana, as I think she must be by now) would have to back us up. How you would get on afterwards with old Groggy Rowley, I don’t know. It isn’t likely he has forgotten you tried to wipe the floor with him, if I am to take the captain’s yarn as correct.” “A regular hero,” Williams testified suddenly, in his concealed, from-under-the-table tone. “He’s not afraid of any of them; not he. Ha! ha! Old Topnambo must have....” He glanced at his wife, and bit his tongue--perhaps at the recollection of his unsafe conjugal position--ending in disjointed words, “In his chaise--warrant--separationist--rebel,” and all this without moving a limb or a muscle of his face, till, with a low, throaty chuckle, he fluttered a stony sort of wink to my address. Sebright had paused only long enough for this ebullition to be over. The cool logic of his surmise appalled me. He didn’t see why O’Brien or anybody in Havana should want to interfere with me personally. But if I wanted to keep my young lady, it was obvious she must not arrive in Havana on board a ship where they would be sure to look for her the very first thing. It was even worse than it looked, he declared. His firm conviction was that if the _Lion_ did not turn up in Havana pretty soon, there would be a Spanish man-of-war sent out to look for her--or else Mr. O’Brien was not the man we took him for. There was lying in harbour a corvette called the _Tornado_, a very likely looking craft. I didn’t expect them to fight a corvette. No doubt there would be a fuss made about stopping a British ship on the high seas; but that would be a cold comfort after the lady had been taken away from me. She was a person of so much importance that even our own admiral could be induced--say, by the Captain-General’s remonstrances--to sanction such an action. There was no saying what Rowley would do if they only promised to present him with half a dozen pirates to take home for a hanging. Why! that was the very identical thing the flagship was kept dodging off Havana for! And O’Brien knew where to lay his hands on a gross of such birds, for that matter. “No,” concluded Sebright, overwhelming me from behind, as I sat looking, not at the uncertainties of the future, but at the paralyzing hopelessness of the bare to-morrow. “The _Lion_ is no place for you, whether she goes into Havana or not. Moreover, into Havana she must go now. There’s no help for it. It’s the deuce of a situation.”