who followed him. Never had buccaneers been so rigidly
held in hand, never had they been so firmly restrained, never so
debarred from the excesses of rapine and lust that were usual in their
kind as those who sailed with Captain Blood. It was, you will remember,
stipulated in their articles that in these as in other matters they must
submit to the commands of their leader. And because of the singular good
fortune which had attended his leadership, he had been able to impose
that stern condition of a discipline unknown before among buccaneers.
How would not these men laugh at him now if he were to tell them that
this he had done out of respect for a slip of a girl of whom he had
fallen romantically enamoured? How would not that laughter swell if he
added that this girl had that day informed him that she did not number
thieves and pirates among her acquaintance.

Thief and pirate!

How the words clung, how they stung and burnt his brain!

It did not occur to him, being no psychologist, nor learned in the
tortuous workings of the feminine mind, that the fact that she should
bestow upon him those epithets in the very moment and circumstance of
their meeting was in itself curious. He did not perceive the problem
thus presented; therefore he could not probe it. Else he might have
concluded that if in a moment in which by delivering her from captivity
he deserved her gratitude, yet she expressed herself in bitterness,
it must be because that bitterness was anterior to the gratitude and
deep-seated. She had been moved to it by hearing of the course he had
taken. Why? It was what he did not ask himself, or some ray of light
might have come to brighten his dark, his utterly evil despondency.
Surely she would never have been so moved had she not cared--had she not
felt that in what he did there was a personal wrong to herself. Surely,
he might have reasoned, nothing short of this could have moved her to
such a degree of bitterness and scorn as that which she had displayed.

That is how you will reason. Not so, however, reasoned Captain Blood.
Indeed, that night he reasoned not at all. His soul was given up to
conflict between the almost sacred love he had borne her in all these
years and the evil passion which she had now awakened in him.
Extremes touch, and in touching may for a space become confused,
indistinguishable. And the extremes of love and hate were to-night so
confused in the soul of Captain Blood that in their fusio