“You are one,” Captain Antonio said, “for whom I would do much. If it would not ruffle your pride, I would call you friend. But there is a length to which you cannot ask me to go. I will not be hanged for that slut.”Francisco controlled his anger in a way which, had he considered it, might have been surprise to himself. It was an evidence of the strait in which he stood, which he was coming to see, and which a quarrel with the Genoese sailor would not relieve. But it was the most he could do to reply in temperate words.“I must ask you to take that back, after which we can talk of that which is on your mind.”“Why, so I do, if you wish,” Antonio replied, in a ready way. “I will call her La Cerda’s mistress, or what you will, but you must allow for this, that I have known her before.”“I should say that you do not know her at all.”“Well, so you may. It is a thing I have never sought. So of what she is, or is not, I will say no more, except that she is one for whom I am loth to hang.”“So you have said once before. But you are not asked. Do you know where she is now?”“I could make a most excellent guess.”“So might the Provost-Marshal himself and guess wrong. They cannot hang you for that.”“Yet if there be signs littered before my eyes——”“Which you have no occasion to see.”“Which it might be said that I have. . . . And it is not for myself that I fear alone. For who does that which I must say that I do not know that you do—he is in a most perilous pass, for the Grand Master is one that not only the Turks may dread.”

The sun was setting over the broad waters of the Straits of Gibraltar, and its western rays adorned with brilliant colours and violet shades the serrated mass which has in its wild variety one of the most impressive effects of mountain scenery in the world, when a light galley, flying the scarlet sign of the Maltese Cross, and having cast anchor in Vilheyna’s harbour, but at some distance from the other shipping which it contained, dropped a small skiff, which pulled rapidly toward the quay.From the boat a single officer disembarked, and had directed it to return, even before he was approached by the warden of the quay with a courteous but yet somewhat peremptory challenge of whom he was, and what business had brought him there.It was a tone which may have owed something of its quality to the stranger’s appearance, his turban, and the looseness of the white garments he wore, giving him more the aspect of a Turk than a Christian man. But he answered with the assurance of one confident alike in himself and the business on which he came.