gleaming eyes.

"Advancing a step toward me, with her white hands clasped together, she
said, in a hurried, beseeching voice--and low as was the sound, I heard
it distinctly during the crashing thunder which shook the rocks of the
crag to their foundations--

"'_Senor!_ where am I? My father! Who--who--in the name of the Blessed
Virgin, art _thou_?'

"Again giving a look of the utmost horror around the room, she pressed
her hands to her eyes, and said, in the same low, distinct tone,

"'Speak, _senor_! For the love of our holy Savior, speak!'

"I felt that the girl had saved me, by her own instinctive perception, a
world of painful explanations, and I replied,

"'Lucia! I divine that all farther concealments are useless; you are in
the haunt of the most noted pirate of these seas, and that man stands
before you.'

"_Caballeros!_" continued Captain Brand, "had my pretty prize swooned
away, or fallen down in a fit, or gone into hysterics and torn her
hair out by the roots, I should not have been greatly surprised; but
she did none of those things. On the contrary, she became as calm as
marble--frightfully so, in fact--and pushing back the bands of her
magnificent tresses from her pale forehead, she raised her round
white arm aloft, with her slender fore finger quivering like the tongue
of a viper in mid air, and then poured forth such a torrent of
awfully impressive words that I quailed before her.

"Yes, _senores_, I am no coward, take me when you will; but on this
occasion I must honestly admit that I stood powerless before the gaze
and gesture of that slight, delicately-formed woman.

"'Pirate--wretch--monster! may the curses of hell be heaped upon thee!
Murderer--betrayer! may thy heart be burned, and thy soul blasted
forever!'

"I need not pain you, _senores_, by reciting the cruel words that came
hissing through her closed teeth, nor yet farther describe the terrible
concentrated gaze of hate and fury which streamed from those gleaming
eyes. Suffice it to say, that though often afterward I was treated in
the same manner, yet, on the occasion alluded to, I cut short the
interview by summoning Babette to see her mistress to her chamber, and
then, glad to escape, I went out of the house and attended to the duties
which required my presence."

The padre, with his flat lips half open, eagerly drinking in--with his
Santa Cruz punch--the words of his patron; the doctor, calm, unmoved
now, and thoughtful; the