"You are placed in the most helpless situation a woman could find herself in: at sea, locked up in a cabin, and all the crew, who might otherwise have helped you, believing that you were running away with Mr Lawrence, and that your imprisonment and your representations and your madness were part of a programme preconcerted between you and your lover. You realise the horrors and peril of your position, and by virtue of the mother's genius that came to your help, you decided upon a behaviour which you magnificently conducted. So much for the better part of you: but what remains? To be wooed--shall I say won?--it is necessary for your sweetheart to act the part of a scoundrel. He must steal my ship and kidnap my only child, and heap lie upon lie, and then, to be sure, he is a very pretty gentleman, a noble, gallant rogue, at root a man of a lordly soul, of a most chivalrous and fighting spirit to be made much of--in short, to fall desperately in love with." Lucy bit her under-lip, but certainly the general expression of her face was not one of displeasure. "So, my dear, you see that your mother was right in putting faith in her quotation, 'Most women have no characters at all.'" Whether Lucy would have replied to this cannot be known, for just then the hand stationed aloft sung out: "Sail ho!" "Where away?" "Right ahead, sir." But the stranger remained so long invisible from the deck whilst she could be easily distinguished from the height of the fore-topgallant and then from the fore-topsail yard, and then from midway the altitude of the fore-shrouds, that it was not before the afternoon had passed into a golden brightness of westering sunlight that the ship right ahead revealed her canvas to the quarterdeck of the _Aurora_. From the moment the ship in sight was reported expectation aboard the _Aurora_ sprang and grew. Was she the _Minorca_? She was undoubtedly square-rigged, but the lenses of the comparatively feeble telescopes of those days could not determine before it fell dusk, whether she was rigged aft with square yards or merely with the mizzen and gaff topsail which made the _Minorca_ a barque. The Admiral was restless; he paced the deck with unwearied legs, and when the sail ahead had hove her canvas into view, he sent endless searchings of her through his telescope, but never could arrive at an opinion. Captain Acton was self-possessed, and his manner was marked by contemplation as though the possibilities the ship in sight suggested filled him with earnest and bewildering considerations.