er attentions to Elizabeth, and he divined who had
fired that shot meant for himself.

"Come up to me," called Edmonson, turning suddenly upon him. "I've no
weapon now. My face can't turn you to stone, though I'd be a Medusa to
do it. But no, I'll do better than that. Come here! come here!" he
repeated excitedly.

Harwin went up to him in silence, reading as he went a lesson that wrote
itself on his mind as if in letters of blood. The man before him was
well-born, well-educated, and skilled in all the graces of society,
accepted even in court circles; yet, as he lay there, he looked a slave,
for the nobility of freedom had gone, and the mark of the brute nature
was on his forehead, and in his hand that he stretched out with the
longing in it to grasp his victim. The soldier on the bed next his, who
had spent a good part of his thirty years of life in a fishing-smack,
who knew nothing of books beyond what the common-school education had
given him, and less of any life but his own venturesome calling, who
beyond knowledge of the sea and its dangers had been taught only by the
quickness of his own wit and the honor of his own heart,--this man, as
he turned attentive eyes upon the approaching figure, Harwin
involuntarily glanced at. In a flash of insight he saw in the
uprightness of the sailor's face the beauty of such strength. Then he
looked back at Edmonson, and there he saw his own heart in exaggeration,
and he trembled.

As he went up to Edmonson, the latter raised himself from his elbow, and
sitting upright leaned as near him as he could.

"Do you know me?" he asked.

The other nodded, "Mr. Edmonson."

"Yes. Do you know that I was to have married Mistress Royal?" Harwin
assented again. "Who told you?"

"Mistress Archdale."

"Ah! yes, the little golden-haired one that thinks herself such a
beauty."

"She is infinitely more than she can think herself," cried Harwin.

Edmonson turned upon him a look of malign triumph. "Ah!" he said. "You
suffer, too." He was silent for an instant. "But then you think that you
may yet win her," he said. "Who knows?" and he watched his listener
closely, "Women are strange," he added. "She'd be flattered by your
having been a scamp for her sake; she is not like the other one." He saw
the light flash into Harwin's eyes and leave its bright mark along his
cheek, and he smiled. "But you never shall," he said. "You might, but
you never shall. Did you see what happened a minute ago?