She looked away from him again, and found that her sight was blurred.  After a moment in a voice less steady than before she asked him: 

“Why should this Frenchman have told you such a tale?  Did he hate this Captain Blood?”

“I did not gather that,” said his lordship slowly.  “He related it... oh, just as a commonplace, an instance of buccaneering ways.

“A commonplace!” said she.  “My God!  A commonplace!”

“I dare say that we are all savages under the cloak that civilization fashions for us,” said his lordship.  “But this Blood, now, was a man of considerable parts, from what else this Cahusac told me.  He was a bachelor of medicine.”

“That is true, to my own knowledge.”

“And he has seen much foreign service on sea and land.  Cahusac said - though this I hardly credit — that he had fought under de Ruyter.”

“That also is true,” said she.  She sighed heavily.  “Your Cahusac seems to have been accurate enough.  Alas!”

“You are sorry, then?”

She looked at him.  She was very pale, he noticed.

“As we are sorry to hear of the death of one we have esteemed.  Once I held him in regard for an unfortunate but worthy gentleman.  Now....”

She checked, and smiled a little crooked smile.  “Such a man is best forgotten.”

And upon that she passed at once to speak of other things.  The friendship, which it was her great gift to command in all she met, grew steadily between those two in the little time remaining, until the event befell that marred what was promising to be the pleasantest stage of his lordship’s voyage.

The marplot was the mad-dog Spanish Admiral, whom they encountered on the second day out, when halfway across the Gulf of Gonaves.  The Captain of the Royal Mary was not disposed to be intimidated even when Don Miguel opened fire on him.  Observing the Spaniard’s plentiful seaboard towering high above the water and offering him so splendid a mark, the Englishman was moved to scorn.  If this Don who flew the banner of Castile wanted a fight, the Royal Mary was just the ship to oblige him.  It may be that he was justified of his gallant confidence, and that he would that day have put an end to the wild career of Don Miguel de Espinosa, but that a lucky shot from the Milagrosa got among some powder stored in his forecastle, and blew up half his ship almost before the fight had started.  How the powder came there will never now be known, and the gallant Captain himself did not survive to enquire into it.

Before the men of the Royal Mary had recovered from their consternation, their captain killed and a third of their number destroyed with him, the ship yawing and rocking helplessly in a crippled state, the Spaniards boarded her.