was the voice of a lady. A busy man, with a great charge upon him, he was yet human, and was sensible of some natural curiosity to make acquaintance with the heroine of an adventure wherein a woman had stood beside her captain when his crew flinched.

"Release him, madam; I will hear you. Bring her within."

Blinded by stinging tears, Sue saw nothing, nor was capable of hearing reason; but Furley's hands were laid upon hers with gentle insistence. proximity calmed her; she could trust him.

His

"Cast him loose, my gal; His Honor bids thee. He'll listen to us. an' do thee right, never fear! Lifting her to her feet, he drew her hand within his arm.

The door of the inner room closed upon the matter-a suit matrimonial preferred at a moment's notice. Who would be Governor upon such terms? Who would not with such women about? Within the anteroom nine men out of the ten turned wide-eyed and open-mouthed to one another for explanation, corroboration, and sympathy. It was no business of theirs, but the cry of a woman, and such cries, are the business of every man within call; and nine tongues wagged softly. But the tenth major sate silent, a small, neat-handed, wellgroomed man, whom we recognize as our friend Wade Justin. He sate hearing only his own heart knock whilst the room buzzed softly around him. "He said," "She said," "My word, how he looked!" "Lord, what a figure!" He caught never a word of it, having all his work to hold himself together, to command hands and lips, whilst over and over within the back of a whirling brain the question, "Is it possible?" ran round and round like a wheel, and over and under it the words, "So like, 80 like!" ticked

on and on like a death-watch in an empty house at midnight. For all that he knew he might have been alone in the anteroom. When the lady had raised her veil Justin had caught his breath; when her soft contralto call had pulsed across the room, the blood had flown to his head; voice, eye, face, figure, had brought him to his feet with his heart in his mouth, had swept away the mists of seventeen years and shown him again, as in a swift, waking dream, the lost love of his youth. He had hovered, watchful and tense, upon the verge of speech and action during those hot moments of claim and denial, watching baffled affection beating itself to death against the spikes of brute selfishness. Surmising much, fettered by his ignorance, he had hardly restrained himself, and now knew that he had done well.

The Governor motioned the weeping girl to a chair. Furley and Chisholm steadied her into it: her agitation was piteous. The three men remained standing, the two upon Sue's either hand, the one as far from her as his dignity and the arrangements of the room permitted.

"And now, madam," said Eliott, "I will thank you to explain yourself; say what ye have to say, and as briefly as possible."

"Before these-civilians, Sir George?" demurred Boyle.

"As I understand the matter, sir, they are the lady's attestors. Am I right?".

"She can't dew wi'aut me," drawled Furley, still holding the lady's hand in his immense paw. "Cheer up, my gal!" This last in a gruff whisper audible to all.

"Can't do?' and why? Pardon me, Sir George, but this is like to be a ticklish matter for a man in my service. This injurious claim, ridiculous

though it be, touches me very closely, and I fail to see what interest it can have to persons who are utter strangers to me."

"Do ye stick to that?" asked the Governor, observing repudiation leap simultaneously to the eyes of both the lady's backers.

"I do, sir."

"Then there yew be a point or tew off yar course, bor, as I'll precious soon show ye," drawled Furley.

"I have messed wi' Major Boyle a guid few times," said Chisholm guardedly.

Boyle snorted indignantly. "I doubt it, but it might be. I cannot recall the face of every subaltern in the service."

"They will remain, sir," said the Governor. "If ye can rebut the lady's charge, whatever it may be, their presence here will have done ye good rather than harm. Now, madam."

If

Sue had in some measure recovered herself; she was a girl of spirit. the suddenness of the occasion in the anteroom had taken her unawares, she knew well that it now behoved her to fight with dignity and courage.

Palpitating she was, tingling and almost physically sore from the vehemence of her husband's rebuff, and as exquisitely mortified as a woman of delicate nurture must be who, surprised and carried beyond herself by love's urgency, has bared, as it were, her very bosom's warmth and secret tenderness to the man of her heart, only to find herself spurned with insults: and this in the presence of male strangers; his friends belike. She shut her eyes tightly, and shuddered inwardly like a guilty thing at the thought of the indignity, the exposure of it. What must those gentlemen think of ber?

The Governor's voice hummed in her ears; there was a sort of human comfort in it; he seemed a fatherly old perRallying at the pressure of Fur

son.

ley's great hand, and conscious of young Chisholm at her side, she drew the tattered rags of her womanly pride around her stripped shoulders, called dumbly upon her Maker, and opened her eyes. She had raised her veil, her little hands were a-work in her lap, her lovely countenance flushed and wet with tears, but with a steady voice she preferred her case. "He is my husband, sir; Major Cornelius Tighe is his name. I made his acquaintance in the stage, whilst travelling from Chester to London last December; the twelfth it was. My aunt had died; I was on my way to live with another aunt-"

"Yes, yes, come to the point," urged Sir George, with some natural impatience of details.

"And he was very civil, kind, indeed; and when we got to London it was all strange to me, for I was not met, and it was dark, and the hackney coachman was drunk and tried to have my purse. Also he took me to the wrong house, and oh, they told me it was my aunt's house, and that she was just buried. What made them tell such wicked lies I don't know, for it was some other woman's house, and she would not let me stop even for one night, sir. And Con. I mean Major Tighe, who happened to be passing-I don't know how, but he was, and had saved me from the coachman and beaten him--Con, sir, would have it that there was nothing for it but I must marry him at once, that very minute. He could give me the protection of his name, he said. And just then a clergyman happened to come in, and he said so too, and I was bewildered and lost, sir; and I am an orphan, and they were all round me at once, and it seemed so improper to pass the night in the streetall in the dark; and-and-and-I let the clergyman do it. Was I wrong?" She bent her head and wept gently.

"And ye are sure that this is the person?" asked the Governor.

"Oh, quite quite sure. How can I doubt it? He was my husband. We lived together for how long was it, Con? Weeks! And you were kind to me at first. Oh, Con, you know! But why did ye spend all my money and leave me? Why do ye deny me?"

And again that wonderful contralto moved all hearts in the room-save

one.

"But I do deny it, madam," said Boyle hardily. coming forward with a stride and half turning to the Governor, who regarded him closely, and after a momentary pause asked whether he denied the marriage merely, or every circumstance of the lady's story.

"Every single circumstance, Sir George. I solemnly assure ye I have never set eyes upon the leedy until ten minutes back. There is no particle of truth in her tale, so far as regards myself, I mean-for I wish to spare the young person if it be possible. "Tis plainly a case of misteeken identity. To begin with, my name is not Tighe." "But your Christian name is, as I think, Cornelius?" remarked the Gov

ernor.

"A coincidence, merely, Sir George. The name is a common one in Ireland."

"But if yewr name was not Tighe, whoy did ye call yewrself Tighe when yew went and merried this here young female?" asked Furley, laying the lines upon the table. "I was there, yewr warship-m'lord-my friend, I should

say.

They called me in out o' the strit to give the gal away. I see her goo inter the house; I see this man a-follerin of her. She sim'd a bit scairt, for she stuck her little head outer winder and sorter shruck tew me for help. Soo, in I gooed, and sorter saw fair play. Twere done t' rights, so far as I could make out; oh, the chap were a passon right enough. This here man promised this an' that, and there was a ring; and he sim'd to make out as

how he done it all out o' the goodness and pity of his heart. But I'd my 'spicions; and I say," wheeling suddenly upon Boyle, "d'jew remember what I says tew ye jes' afore yew left the house wi' this here lady?"

"I tell ye I've never met you before, my good man," replied Boyle blandly. Without change of face, Furley crossed the room and took the amazed Irishman by the wrists. "Now, does thee rec'lect me?" The men's eyes met and remained as it were in contact, whilst their bodies rocked, and it was the bold, hard eye of the soldier that flinched first.

Many a time had Boyle beaten down an enemy's glance; few had found themselves able to endure the menace of his haughty stare when it pleased him to assume the bully, but now, and almost for the first time, the man found himself unable to meet the uncompromising thrusts of those steelgray daggers which stabbed his brain from under the sea-captain's bushy brows.

The paralyzing stricture of his adversary's grip infuriated him, whilst distracting his attention; it broke upon him that here was his master; that this was a man who could have killed him with his naked fists. He blenched, and knew that he blenched, and that the Governor watched him, and noted.

The gage had been thrown down, picked up, and the duel fought and won in the space of three ticks of the Governor's clock.

"Sir George, what does this mean?" protested Boyle, after one vehement but ineffectual effort to free himself.

"Release him. Master, and stand back," bade the judge. The burly, oaken-faced seaman obeyed. "The larst time as I had that there feller in the bilboes that way was when he'd a-got a jarvey down and seemed o' harf a mind for to dew for him. Oh, he rec'lects me right enough; don't ye, bor?

Majesty's commissioned officers, that ye did not go through the form of marriage with this young woman?"

There was a pause. Boyle, at the end of his resources, inwardly shivered and plunged. "It was no marriage, sir, and she knew it."

Furley, the mastiff leaning upon a leash, let a low, gurgling roar, and then threw back his mighty shoulders, lifting fists like knots in three-inch cable. For an instant the Quaker died within him, the beast awoke and wrought in his muscles, then manhood came to the top, but it was the manhood of an earlier experience, the prizefighter. "Foul blow, that, bor! We claim the stakes!"

And Sue? Nature takes the deepest wound without audible protest. There are injuries to flesh and spirit so unforeseen, so bewildering and overmastering, that it does not occur to the victim to relieve the tension of such fierce anguish with a cry.

Sue winced as she sate as if from a cruel stripe; the quivering eye, dilated nostril, and the pallor of parted lips voiced her dumb distress. Oh, the shame of it! the wicked wrong of it! What would poor dear auntie have said? What must the Governor think? and Mr. Chisholm? . . . Neither maid, wife, nor widow, and not twenty. Oh, the cruelty of it! Slowly she turned from the man whom until that moment she had believed to be her husband, nor did she look at him again; love had died hard, but was dead at last.

"No marriage? Ye are drolling, surely, Major," interposed Chisholm, curbing his voice to a softness that sounded very strange to his own ears, and would have seemed ominous to any one who knew him.

"Sirrah, will ye be pleased to hold your peace or to leave this room?" asked the Governor sternly.

The lad bowed himself back into a tense self-command. Goliath disdained

to acknowledge the presence of little David by the movement of an eyelid.

It was from this moment that Chisholm dated his manhood. Not yet had that exquisite hope arisen beckoning him on; for the time he had never a thought of self, all was for her; he had hitherto been simmering with indignation, but this dastardly stab found him cool and hard as a blade come from its final bath, tempered for use. The saeva indignatio of his race, the cold fury of countless generations of combative Celts, burned in the eyes which shone in the wan, white face of him. Had those two been alone upon some narrow inch or skerry, as in the long-syne day of the Norse holm-gang, it was not the slender lad that would have been left to the tide and the gulls; courteous, cautious, and incredibly sudden and agile, the burly soldier would have rued his meeting with such a human wild-cat.

"Then, it comes to this, sir," the Governor was summing up. "You own to seducing an innocent child by a pretence of marriage, and to having left her upon the streets penniless”

"I am a soldier, sir," urged Boyle, moistening dry lips and laboring excuses, "I profess mesilf no better than others, nor do I conceive mesilf to be worse; a man in a marching regiment must take his pleasures where he finds 'em. I am not the first at this game. nor am I like to be the last. I ven. ture to appale to your Excellency as a man to a man. You have been young, you are still human; did we consthruct oursilves? Such as we are, are we not as God made us?"

"I have no authority to speak for the Almighty whom ye claim as an acces. sory before the fact, but, for myself, sir, whom ye charge as particeps criminis, I simply return your words in your teeth, and ask ye, Have ye done?" The Governor was warming. "Your pardon is begged, Sir George."