"Sit, then, to please me, Marguerite, and I will tell you what I said." She hesitated a moment, standing before him, the hood of her capote, with its rich purple, dropping from the fluttering yellow hair that the moonlight deepened into gold, and the fire-opal clasp rising and falling with her breath, like an imprisoned flame. He touched her hand, still warm and soft, with his own, which was icy. She withdrew it, turned her eyes, whose fair, faint lustre, the pale forget-me-not blue, was darkened by the antagonistic light to an amethystine shadow, inquiringly upon him. "There is some danger," she murmured. "Yes. When you are not a mark for general observation, you shall hear it." "I would rather hear it standing." "I told you the condition." "Then I shall go and ask Captain Tarbell." "And come sobbing back to me for 'reassurance.'" "No," she said, quickly, "I should go down to Ursule." "Ursule has a mattress on deck; I assisted her up." "There is the captain! Now"---- He seized her hand and drew her down beside him. For an instant she would have resisted, as the sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks attested,--and then, with the instinctive feminine baseness that compels every woman, when once she has met her master, she submitted. "I am sorry, if you are offended," said he. "But the captain cannot attend to you now, and it is necessary to be guarded in movement; for a slight thing on such occasions may produce a panic." "You should not have forced me to sit," said she, in a smothered voice, without heeding him; "you had no right." "This right, that I assume the care of you." "Monsieur, you see that I am quite competent to the care of myself." "Marguerite, I see that you are determined to quarrel." She paused a moment, ere replying; then drew a little nearer and turned her face toward him, though without looking up. "Forgive me, then!" said she. "But I would rather be naughty and froward, it lets me stay a child, and so you can take me in keeping, and I need not think for myself at all. But if I act like a woman grown, then comes all the responsibility, and I must rely on myself, which is such trouble now, though I never felt it so before,--I don't know why. Don't you see?" And she glanced at him with her head on one side, and laughing archly. "You were right," he replied, after surveying her a moment; "my proffered protection is entirely superfluous." She thought he was about to go, and placed her hand on his, as it lay along the side. "Don't leave me," she murmured. "I have no intention of leaving you," he said. "You are very good. I have never seen one like you. I love you well." And, bathed in moonlight, she raised her face and her glowing lips toward him.