e pinion which should bear us we
knew not whither. I stopped short in my tracks, Mistress Percy drew a
sobbing breath, and the minister gasped with admiration. We all three
stared as though the white cloth had veritably been a monster wing
endowed with life.

"Sails don't rise of themselves!" I exclaimed, and was at the mast
before the words were out of my lips. Crouched behind it was a man. I
should have known him even without the aid of the moon. Often enough,
God knows, I had seen him crouched like this beside me, ourselves in
ambush awaiting some unwary foe, brute or human; or ourselves in hiding,
holding our breath lest it should betray us. The minister who had been a
player, the rival who would have poisoned me, the servant who would
have stabbed me, the wife who was wife in name only,--mine were strange
shipmates.

He rose to his feet and stood there against the mast, in the old
half-submissive, half-defiant attitude, with his head thrown back in the
old way.

"If you order me, sir, I will swim ashore," he said, half sullenly,
half--I know not how.

"You would never reach the shore," I replied. "And you know that I
will never order you again. Stay here if you please, or come aft if you
please."

I went back and took the tiller from Sparrow. We were now in mid-river,
and the swollen stream and the strong wind bore us on with them like a
leaf before the gale. We left behind the lights and the clamor, the dark
town and the silent fort, the weary Due Return and the shipping about
the lower wharf. Before us loomed the Santa Teresa; we passed so close
beneath her huge black sides that we heard the wind whistling through
her rigging. When she, too, was gone, the river lay bare before us;
silver when the moon shone, of an inky blackness when it was obscured by
one of the many flying clouds.

My wife wrapped her mantle closer about her, and, leaning back in her
seat in the stern beside me, raised her face to the wild and solemn
heavens. Diccon sat apart in the bow and held his tongue. The minister
bent over, and, lifting the man that lay in the bottom of the boat, laid
him at full length upon the thwart before us. The moonlight streamed
down upon the prostrate figure. I think it could never have shone upon
a more handsome or a more wicked man. He lay there in his splendid dress
and dark beauty, Endymion-like, beneath the moon. The King's ward turned
her eyes upon him, kept them there a moment, then glanced away, a