"Don't I? I calculate I've sworn enough to sink a seventy-four-gun ship," said he, with a mocking laugh; "but surely," he added, drawing nearer her, and adopting a coaxing tone and bearing, "in time you'll forget all about that fellow, and see the necessity of quietly becoming Mrs. Ithuriel Smash, when you cannot make a _better of it_." The girl's heart seemed to give a great bound, and then to die within her, at these words, the look that accompanied and the dreadful inference to be deduced from them. "Anyhow, I calculate that I shan't forget the evening I saw you and that yaw-haw beast of a Britisher giving each other such nice tokens of your mutual good-will--he giving you what he calls his heart--and you making a free gift of the whole seigneury of St. Eustache! If once he comes within the reach of my rifle...!" The Colonel was unable to express what would happen then. He clenched hands and set his great yellow teeth with such force, that his quid slipped down his throat and nearly choked him. Two or three days were passed by Aurelia in extreme misery and captivity, and almost hourly she was warned by Smash that his patience would soon be exhausted, and he would "send for the parson." She secluded herself in her own room, and found for a little time a temporary protector in Papineau, one of the rebel leaders, a dapper little French colonist, who had now come to concert measures for the defence of the village, and urged that the young lady must not be intruded upon. "Snakes alive! man, don't I tell you she is to be my wife?" roared Smash. "_Mon Dieu_, my dear Colonel, that may be so," replied Papineau, taking a pinch in the old Parisian fashion; "win the heiress, but woo her gently. A lady can only receive in her own apartment a clergyman or a doctor." "And a hairdresser," added the barber of the village who was there, armed to the teeth. "By Jerusalem, then, I'll go as a hairdresser and scalp her, if she gives me more trouble! I'll teach her that I'm half-horse, half-alligator!" exclaimed Smash, who by this time was intoxicated to a dangerous extent. A violent illness--the fever of great fear--had prostrated Madame Darnel. Separated from the latter, Aurelia was without the little protection her presence might have afforded. She was glad to keep beside the female domestics of the seigneury, from among whom she was often haled forth shrieking to endure the extraordinary love-speeches of Smash; at last the women quitted the house in terror, and she was left there alone--alone with a man whom she now loathed with a fear indescribable! CHAPTER X. THE END GROWING NEAR.