burning me to hell!"

Moya took no notice of the word, nor yet of the request.

"Before I do any more for you," said she, "you must tell me the truth."

"I have!"

"Oh, no, you haven't: not the particular truth I want to know. I know it
already. Still I mean to hear it from you. It's the truth on quite a
different matter; that's what I want," said Moya, and stood over the
poor devil as he desired, so that at last the sun was off him, though
now he had Moya's eyes instead. "I--I wonder you can't guess--what I've
guessed!" she added after a pause.

But she also wondered at something else, for in that pause the
blood-stained face had grown ghastlier than before, and Moya could not
understand it. The man was so sorely stricken that recapture must now be
his liveliest hope: why then should he fear a discovery more or less?
And it was quite a little thing that Moya thought she had discovered; a
little thing to him, not to her; and she proceeded to treat it as such.

"You know you're not Captain Bovill at all," she told him, in the quiet
voice of absolutely satisfied conviction.

"Who told you that?" he roared, half raising himself for the first time,
and the fear and fury in his eyes were terrible to see.

"Nobody."

"Ah!"

"But I know it all the same. I've known it this last half-hour. And if I
hadn't I should know it now. I see it--where I ought to have seen it
from the first--in your face."

"You mean because my son's not the dead spit of his father? But he never
was; he took after his mother; he'll tell you that himself."

"It's not what I meant," said Moya, "though it is through the man you
call your son that I know he is nothing of the kind. His father may have
been a criminal; he was something else first; he would not have left a
woman to perish of thirst in the bush, a woman who had done him no
harm--who only wished to befriend him--who was going to marry his son!"

There were no oaths to this; but the black eyes gleamed shrewdly in the
blood-stained face, and the conical head wagged where it lay.

"You never were in the hulks, you see," said the convict; "else you'd
know. No matter what a man goes in, they all come out alike, brute
beasts every one. I'm all that, God help me! But I'm the man--I'm the
man. Do you think he'd have held out a finger to me if I hadn't been?"

"I've no doubt you convinced him that you were."

"How can one man convince another that he's his father?"

"I don't know. I on