el John replied, rising to his feet and speaking
with gloomy firmness. "It is on their behalf I appeal to you. For it is
they who foresee the least, and they who will suffer the most. It is
they who will follow like sheep, and they who like sheep will go to the
butcher! Ay, it is they," he continued with deeper feeling, and he
turned to Flavia, "who are yours, and they will pay for you.
Therefore," raising his hand for silence, "before you name the prize,
sum up the cost! Your country, your faith, your race--these are great
things, but they are far off and can do without you. But these--these
are that fragment of your country, that tenet of your faith, that
handful of your race which God has laid in the palm of your hand, to
cherish or to crush, and----"

"The devil!" Machin ejaculated with sudden violence. Perhaps he read in
the girl's face some shadow of hesitation, of thought, of perplexity.
"Have done with your preaching, sir, I say! Have done, man! Try us not
too far! If we fail----"

"You must fail!" Colonel John retorted--with that narrowing of the
nostrils that in the pinch of fight men long dead had seen for a moment
in distant lands, and seen no more. "You will fail! And failing, sir,
his reverence will stand no worse than now, for his life is forfeit
already! While you----"

"What of me? Well, what of me?" the stout man cried truculently. His
brows descended over his eyes, and his lips twitched.

"For you, Admiral Cammock----"

The other stepped forward a pace. "You know me?"

"Yes, I know you."

There was silence for an instant, while those who were in the secret
eyed Colonel Sullivan askance, and those who were not gaped at Cammock.

Soldiers of fortune, of fame and name, were plentiful in those days,
but seamen of equal note were few. And with this man's name the world
had lately rung. An Irishman, he had risen high in Queen Anne's
service; but at her death, incited by his devotion to the Stuarts, he
had made a move for them at a critical moment. He had been broken,
being already a notable man; on which, turning his back on an
ungrateful country, as he counted it, he had entered the Spanish
marine, which the great minister Alberoni was at that moment reforming.
He had been advanced to a position of rank and power--Spain boasted no
stouter seaman; and in the attempt on which Alberoni was bent, to upset
the Protestant succession in England, Admiral Cammock was a factor of
weight. He was a bold, res