oman came to him, and
told him that under no circumstances could Mistress Bonnet now be seen.

But he would not leave the house. He called for writing materials, but
in an instant threw down the pen. Again he called a servant and sent a
message, which was of no avail. Dame Charter would have gone down to
him, but Kate was in her arms. For several minutes the furious officer
stood by the chair in which Kate had been sitting; he could not
comprehend the fact that this girl had discarded and had scorned him.
And yet her scorn had not in the least dampened the violence of his
love. As she stood and spoke her last bitter words, the grandeur of her
beauty had made him speechless to defend himself.

He seized his hat and rushed from the house; hot, and with blazing eyes,
he appeared in the counting-room of Mr. Delaplaine, and there, to that
astounded merchant, he told, with brutal cruelty, of his orders to
destroy the pirate Bonnet, his niece's father; and then he related the
details of his interview with that niece herself.

Mr. Delaplaine's countenance, at first shocked and pained, grew
gradually sterner and colder. Presently he spoke. "I will hear no more
such words, Captain Vince," he said, "regarding the members of my
family. You say my niece knows not what fortune she trifles with; I
think she does. And when she told you she would not accept the offer of
your dishonour, I commend her every word."

Captain Vince frowned black as night, and clapped his hand to his
sword-hilt; but the pale merchant made no movement of defence, and the
captain, striking his clinched fist against the table, dashed from the
room. Before he reached his ship he had sworn a solemn oath: he vowed
that he would follow that pirate ship; he would kill, burn, destroy,
annihilate, but out of the storm and the fire he would pick unharmed the
father of the girl who had entranced him and had spurned him. He laughed
savagely as he thought of it. With that dolt of a father in his hands, a
man wearing always around his neck the hangman's noose, he would hold
the card which would give him the game. What Mistress Kate Bonnet might
say or do; what she might like or might not like; what her ideas about
honour might be or might not be, it would be a very different thing when
he, her imperious lover, should hold the end of that noose in his hand.
She might weep, she might rave, but come what would, she was the man's
daughter, and she would be Lady Vince.

So