Never Lose Anything Again

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Never Lose Anything Again

His hand dropped at last, and he straightened himself, with a long breath. "Who threw me into the boat?" he demanded. "The honor was mine," declared the minister. The King's minion lacked not the courage of the body, nor, when passionate action had brought him naught, a certain re- serve force of philosophy. He now did the best thing he could have done,—burst into a roar of laughter. "Zooks!" he cried. "It's as good a comedy as ever I saw! How's the play to end, captain? Are we to go off laughing, or is the end to be bloody after all? For instance, is there murder to be done?" He looked at me boldly, one hand on his hip, the other twirling his mustaches. "We are not all murderers, my lord," I told him. "For the present you are in no danger other than that which is common to us all." He looked at the clouds piling behind us, thicker and thicker, higher and higher, at the bending mast, at the black water swirling now and again over the gunwales. "It's enough," he muttered. I beckoned to Diccon, and putting the tiller into his hands went forward to reef the sail. When it was done and I was back in my place, my lord spoke again. "Where are we going, captain?" "I don't know." "If you leave that sail up much longer, you will land us at the bottom of the river." "There are worse places," I replied. He left his seat, and moved, though with caution, to one nearer Mistress Percy. "Are cold and storm and peril sweeter to you, lady, than warmth and safety, and a love that would guard you from, not run you into, danger?" he said in a whis- per. "Do you not wish this boat the Santa Teresa, these rude boards the velvet cushions of her state cabin, this darkness her many lights, this cold her warmth, with the night shut out and love shut in?" His audacity, if it angered me, yet made me laugh. Not so with the King's ward. She shrank from him until she pressed against the tiller. Our flight, the pursuing feet, the struggle at the wharf, her wounded arm of which she had not told, the ter- ror of the white sail rising as if by magic, the vision of the man