d me thus strongly. To my thought this stranger
was one who had purchased, from priests at the altar, what was mine by
divine decree; what would remain mine forever from the mandate of love
unchangeable, eternally sealed by higher power than any priestly ritual.

Yet I had already passed through a day and night of intense excitement,
of grave peril, endeavoring to preserve the life of this man whom I
would more gladly see die than any one I ever knew. I stood now in the
open jaws of my own destruction, where the slightest false movement, or
ill-judged word, upon his part or my own, must mean betrayal; where an
awakening of suspicion in the simple mind of the sentry without, or of
his captain in the corridor; the return to consciousness, or chance
discovery, of the bound priest upon the upper deck, would ruin every
hope, sentencing me to a fate no less speedy or certain than that which
now awaited him I sought to serve. All this had I risked that I might
aid in the escape of the one and only man in all the wide world who
stood between me and the woman I loved.

It was an odd position, a heartless caprice of fate. I felt the full
measure of its strangeness, yet the thought never occurred to me of
shrinking back from duty, nor slightest dream of realizing a personal
victory through any act of baseness. I was not there for his sake, or
my own, but to redeem my pledged word to her whose slightest wish was
law, whose pleading face forever rose before me. Nevertheless, as I
stood fronting him for the first time, there was little except bitter
hatred in my heart--hatred which, no doubt, burned for the instant
within my eyes,--but a hatred which never returned, to curse my memory,
from that day unto this. I may have found much to test my patience,
much to dislike about him in those weary weeks which followed, much of
weakness and of fickle spirit, but naught ever gave birth anew to the
deep resentment I buried there.

The room in which I found myself was long and narrow, dimly lighted by
an oil lamp screwed fast into a blackened beam overhead. Along one
side was the bare wall, unrelieved in its plain planking except for a
small cracked mirror and a highly colored picture of the Virgin in a
rude frame. Opposite, two berths were arranged one above the other,
both partially concealed by a dingy red curtain extending from ceiling
to floor. The only other furniture I noted in my hasty survey
consisted of a rough stool cha