(_Myself._)—“I am far from sure of it, Timothy, but prophecy is of little help to us. We must follow these people and let them know that we are following them. Impudence has stopped one of their fleet and may stop another. I am going to see how far it helps me with the Jew himself.” More I said to the same end, but there would be no purpose in repeating it. Let it be sufficient that we decided ultimately upon a plan of pursuit which would keep these people aware of our presence by night and day, and provoke them to every attack which it lay in their power to make upon us. The rest was beyond us. We could but face the issue calmly, accepting that which was decreed both for ourselves and for her whose safety we so ardently desired. CHAPTER XXVI. SEVEN DAYS LATER. _The Rogues Fall Out._ There is much of which my log might speak to tell the history of the seven days which followed upon our resolution. We had pledged ourselves to harass the Diamond Ship by night and day, and bravely had we done so. Incessantly now the messages passed from our deck to hers by way of her flags and instruments. Threats, defiance, insult—to these we became accustomed. A torture of suspense had been superseded by a dull submission to necessity. Joan Fordibras was a prisoner, and we could not lift a hand to save her. I did not trust myself to think what she had suffered or what those hours of alternating hope and suspense must have meant to her. No light came to me of the sunniest day. I could but wait and watch. All this time we lay drifting some two or three miles, I suppose, from the great vessel which harboured the Jew and his company. Sometimes, when the night was moonless, we ran up boldly and spied the huge ship out, defying her untrained gunners and learning what we would of that which passed upon her decks. There was a cabin aft, I remember, which I named as Joan’s; and I would place her therein and depict her in my mind sheltered there from the Jew’s anger and the insults of his fellows. How changed she must be from the Joan I had seen upon the beach at Dieppe, the laughing little Thalia of the sandy shore—the Joan who had plied me with such earnest questions, looked up at me with eyes so full of doubt and the desire to believe! Nor could I hope to be in any sense the figure of her childish romance. She might not even know that _White Wings_ followed her at all—possibly they kept her too close a prisoner to learn anything, which the guns did not tell her, of our pursuit and its consequences. Such must be my supposition as I watched the yellow light glowing in her cabin windows and said that Joan was awake and weary for my coming.