It was not only L'Estrange's love, which was really great, but his pride that now suffered. He had boasted to his fellow-officers of his beautiful fiancee--he had even shown them her miniature; he had heard them praise it and call him a lucky fellow; he had pictured to himself the pride with which he would introduce his elegant partner; he had spoken of their union as a thing fixed and certain;--and now to be spurned, jilted by her thus, because a young lord was showing her attention!--the thought was maddening; and in his wrath he swore eternal hatred to the false fair one, and eternal, dreadful vengeance on him who had stolen her heart! He hoped that she might yet have mistaken her object--that the Earl's attentions were mere flirtations; but on making inquiry he daily learned that the worst results were to be feared, and he now began to devise means to frustrate them. His whole character seemed changed. Instead of the gay, lighthearted man he used to be, he became silent, morose, vindictive; and his fellow-officers, having learned the reason, looked forward in anticipation to some dreadful catastrophe. Before proceeding further, however, as Edward L'Estrange is to play a most conspicuous part in this story, a few details of his early life may not be wholly uninteresting. Shrouded in the deepest mystery was Edward L'Estrange's infancy. His first recollections were of a dark and romantic kind, and went to a time when, with a young man of fiendish character, he sailed the Spanish main in a fast schooner with raking masts, and terribly black teeth! The captain of this ship--the young man we have already alluded to--was half a pirate, half a smuggler, and one of the fiercest and most sanguinary monsters that ever disgraced the annals of the sea. In this life of wildness and iniquity the first eight years of L'Estrange's life passed away. Brought up from infancy to be acquainted with revolting scenes of murder and debauchery, and taught to lisp oaths ere he could speak plainly, he was however snatched from an existence of crime before his heart was utterly hardened. One evening--or rather late in the afternoon--as the Black Mail was running under a press of canvas for the island of Cuba a British frigate hove in sight which, as soon as she ascertained the character of the schooner, immediately gave chase. A brisk wind swelled out the sails of both ships, and they seemed rather to fly than sail over the waves. In an hour it became however manifestly evident that the man-of-war was slowly but surely bearing down on her foe, and had already shortened the distance between them from five miles to barely three. The pirate crowded on all sail, hoping, if she could prolong the chase till darkness came, she might yet give her pursuer a wide berth. With anxious face did her skipper watch the globe of light sinking gradually into the ocean's embrace, and with loud oaths anathematized the faithless wind lessening every minute; and what was