That is how you will reason.  Not so, however, reasoned Captain Blood.  Indeed, that night he reasoned not at all.  His soul was given up to conflict between the almost sacred love he had borne her in all these years and the evil passion which she had now awakened in him.  Extremes touch, and in touching may for a space become confused, indistinguishable.  And the extremes of love and hate were to-night so confused in the soul of Captain Blood that in their fusion they made up a monstrous passion.

Thief and pirate!

That was what she deemed him, without qualification, oblivious of the deep wrongs he had suffered, the desperate case in which he found himself after his escape from Barbados, and all the rest that had gone to make him what he was.  That he should have conducted his filibustering with hands as clean as were possible to a man engaged in such undertakings had also not occurred to her as a charitable thought with which to mitigate her judgment of a man she had once esteemed.  She had no charity for him, no mercy.  She had summed him up, convicted him and sentenced him in that one phrase.  He was thief and pirate in her eyes; nothing more, nothing less.  What, then, was she?  What are those who have no charity? he asked the stars.

Well, as she had shaped him hitherto, so let her shape him now.  Thief and pirate she had branded him.  She should be justified.  Thief and pirate should he prove henceforth; no more nor less; as bowelless, as remorseless, as all those others who had deserved those names.  He would cast out the maudlin ideals by which he had sought to steer a course; put an end to this idiotic struggle to make the best of two worlds.  She had shown him clearly to which world he belonged.  Let him now justify her.  She was aboard his ship, in his power, and he desired her.

He laughed softly, jeeringly, as he leaned on the taffrail, looking down at the phosphorescent gleam in the ship’s wake, and his own laughter startled him by its evil note.  He checked suddenly, and shivered.  A sob broke from him to end that ribald burst of mirth.  He took his face in his hands and found a chill moisture on his brow.

Meanwhile, Lord Julian, who knew the feminine part of humanity rather better than Captain Blood, was engaged in solving the curious problem that had so completely escaped the buccaneer.  He was spurred to it, I suspect, by certain vague stirrings of jealousy.  Miss Bishop’s conduct in the perils through which they had come had brought him at last to perceive that a woman may lack the simpering graces of cultured femininity and yet because of that lack be the more admirable.  He wondered what precisely might have been her earlier relations with Captain Blood, and was conscious of a certain uneasiness which urged him now to probe the matter.

His lordship’s pale, dreamy eyes had, as I have said, a habit of observing things, and his wits were tolerably acute.