He drew back a curtain, opened first one door and then another, and she saw sheets of driving rain, and rising, roaring waves, with surf which came beating in on the force of such a fearful gust of wind that Peregrine hastily shut the door, not without difficulty.  “Nobody can stir at present,” he said, as they came into the warm bright room again.  “It is a frightful tempest, the worst known here for years, they say.  The dead-lights, as they call them, have been put in, or the windows would be driven in.  Come and taste Hans’s work; you know it of old.  Will you drink tea?  Do you remember how your mother came to teach mine to brew it, and how she forgave me for being graceless enough to squirt at her?”

There was something so gentle and reassuring in the demeanour of this strange being that Anne, convinced of the utter hopelessness of confronting the storm, as well as of the need of gathering strength, allowed herself to be placed in a chair, and to partake of the food set before her, and the tea, which was served without milk, in an exquisite dragon china cup, but with a saucer that did not match it.

“We don’t get our sets perfect,” said Peregrine, with a smile, who was waiting on her as if she were a princess.

“I entreat you to tell me where we are!” said Anne.  “Not in France?”

“No, not in France!  I wish we were.”

“Then—­can this be the Island?”

“Yes, the Island it is,” said Peregrine, both speaking as South Hants folk; “this is the strange cave or chasm called Black Gang Chine.”

“Black Gang!  Oh! the highwaymen, the pirates!  You have saved me from them.  Were they going to send me to the plantations?”

“You need have no fears.  No one shall touch you, or hurt you.  You shall see no one save by your own consent, my queen.”

“And when this storm is passed—­Oh!” as a more fearful roar and dash sounded as if the waves were about to sweep away their frail shelter—­“you will come with me and save Mr. Archfield’s life?  You cannot know—­”

“I know,” he interrupted; “but why should I be solicitous for his life?  That I am here now is no thanks to him, and why should I give up mine for the sake of him who meant to make an end of me?”

“You little know how he repented.  And your own life?  What do you mean?”

“People don’t haunt the Black Gang Chine when their lives are secure from Dutch Bill,” he answered.  “Don’t be terrified, my queen; though I cannot lay claim, like Prospero, to having raised this storm by my art magic, yet it perforce gives me time to make you understand who and what I am, and how I have recovered my better angel to give her no mean nor desperate career.  It will be better thus than with the suddenness with which I might have had to act.”

A new alarm seized upon Anne as to his possible intentions, but she would not forestall what she so much apprehended, and, sensible that self-control alone could guard her, since escape at present was clearly impossible, she resigned herself to sit opposite to him by the ample hearth of what she perceived to be a fisherman’s hut, thus fitted up luxuriously with, it might be feared, the spoils of the sea.