have no fears. No one shall touch you, or hurt you. You
shall see no one save by your own consent, my queen."

"And when this storm is passed--Oh!" as a more fearful roar and dash
sounded as if the waves were about to sweep away their frail
shelter--"you will come with me and save Mr. Archfield's life? You
cannot know--"

"I know," he interrupted; "but why should I be solicitous for his
life? That I am here now is no thanks to him, and why should I give
up mine for the sake of him who meant to make an end of me?"

"You little know how he repented. And your own life? What do you
mean?"

"People don't haunt the Black Gang Chine when their lives are secure
from Dutch Bill," he answered. "Don't be terrified, my queen;
though I cannot lay claim, like Prospero, to having raised this
storm by my art magic, yet it perforce gives me time to make you
understand who and what I am, and how I have recovered my better
angel to give her no mean nor desperate career. It will be better
thus than with the suddenness with which I might have had to act."

A new alarm seized upon Anne as to his possible intentions, but she
would not forestall what she so much apprehended, and, sensible that
self-control alone could guard her, since escape at present was
clearly impossible, she resigned herself to sit opposite to him by
the ample hearth of what she perceived to be a fisherman's hut, thus
fitted up luxuriously with, it might be feared, the spoils of the
sea.

The story was a long one, and not by any means told consecutively or
without interruption, and all the time those eyes were upon her, one
yellow the other green, with the effect she knew so well of old in
childish days, of repulsion yet compulsion, of terror yet
attraction, as if irresistibly binding a reluctant will. Several
times Peregrine was called off to speak to some one outside the
door, and at noon he begged permission for his friends to dine with
them, saying that there was no other place where the dinner could be
taken to them comfortably in this storm.

CHAPTER XXXII: SEVEN YEARS

"It was between the night and day,
When the Fairy King has power,
That I sunk down in a sinful fray,
And 'twixt life and death was snatched away
To the joyless Elfin bower."

SCOTT.

This motto was almost the account that the twisted figure, with
queer contortions of face, yet delicate feet and hands, and dainty
utterance, might have been expected to give, when An