Mrs. Jacobus faced him suddenly,--the nerves in her body seeming to stiffen, her half-shut eyes fixed on his. The Captain's quailed. "You mean Jerome?" in a low voice. He did not answer. She waited a moment, and then turned again to the window,--holding forcibly down whatever resistance his touch had roused in her. "You mean well," she said, quietly, after a pause. "But you do not know my husband. I was a fool to expect that; yet I did expect it,"--remembering bitterly how, when she brought her husband here, she had counted surely on a real justice for him from the single-minded old Captain, which shrewd, sensible men had not given. "How could I know him? You talk like a woman, Lotty," stammered the Captain. "I never saw M. Jacobus till last night. It was a vague whisper, or rather an old man's whim, that there might be something gone which both you and he wished forgotten." She had her face pressed against the pane, but Lufflin fancied that it lost color, and that the delicate jaws closed with the firmness of a steel spring. "There was no crime," she said, in a moment or two. The old man came close to her after a while, and put his hand gently on her hair; streaked with gray as it was, she seemed nothing but a child to him still. "You're growing like your mother, Lotty," he said. After a long while she spoke again, but under her breath, as if half talking to herself. "We had a child once, Jerome and I," she said. "I know," the Captain rejoined, quickly turning his eyes from her face, and, after waiting for her to go on, added, "Never but the one,--I know." "It was a boy,--little Tom." There was a sudden choking gulp in the mother's throat; she had overrated her strength a little. The old man looked steadily out to sea, and took no notice. "They never were apart, Jerome and the boy," she went on at last, firmly; "and when I would see them at work with their play-tools, or romping together, I used to wonder which of the two had the most simple, affectionate nature, or knew less of the ways of the world." Lufflin said nothing to this defence. He was annoyed at himself for having vexed her,--conscious and remorseful for any wrong he had done M. Jacobus, but with a stronger suspicion than before that he had galled some old wound in her memory. Whatever the secret might be, it had made her feeling for her husband, he saw, as tender and keen with pain as that for the little child she had lost, and whose place none had ever come to fill. "I've often thought, too, that when the time comes"-- She stopped abruptly. "Yes, Charlotte,"--to hide her effort to control herself. "He's gone, Tom is, you know,--eleven years ago, now. But when the time comes for Jerome to see his boy again, I've often thought _he_ would have no reason to dread the child's eyes. It's different with me. But they may say of my husband what they will, my baby need not be afraid to lay his head upon his father's breast. He needn't be afraid."