“Your husband speaks to you, Jack Tier,” said Rose, pointedly.

“May yours never have occasion to speak to you, Rose Budd, in the same way,” was the solemn answer.  “I do not flatter myself that I ever was as comely as you, or that yonder poor dying wretch was a Harry Mulford in his youth; but we were young and happy, and respected once, and loved each other, yet you see what it’s all come to!”

Rose was silenced, though she had too much tenderness in behalf of her own youthful and manly bridegroom to dread a fate similar to that which had overtaken poor Jack.  Spike now seemed disposed to say something, and she went to the side of his bed, followed by her companion, who kept a little in the back-ground, as if unwilling to let the emotion she really felt be seen, and, perhaps, conscious that her ungainly appearance did not aid her in recovering the lost affections of her husband.

“I have been a very wicked man, I fear,” said Spike, earnestly.

“There are none without sin,” answered Rose.  “Place your reliance on the mediation of the Son of God, and sins even far deeper than yours may be pardoned.”

The captain stared at the beautiful speaker, but self-indulgence, the incessant pursuit of worldly and selfish objects for forty years, and the habits of a life into which the thought of God and the dread hereafter never entered, had encased his spiritual being in a sort of brazen armour, through which no ordinary blow of conscience could penetrate.  Still he had fearful glimpses of recent events, and his soul, hanging as it was over the abyss of eternity, was troubled.

“What has become of your aunt?” half whispered Spike—­“my old captain’s widow.  She ought to be here; and Don Wan Montezuma—­where is he?”

Rose turned aside to conceal her tears—­but no one answered the questions of the dying man.  Then a gleaming of childhood shot into the recollection of Spike, and, clasping his hands, he tried to pray.  But, like others who have lived without any communication with their Creator through long lives of apathy to his existence and laws, thinking only of the present time, and daily, hourly sacrificing principles and duty to the narrow interests of the moment, he now found how hard it is to renew communications with a being who has been so long neglected.  The fault lay in himself, however, for a gracious ear was open, even over the death-bed of Stephen Spike, could that rude spirit only bring itself to ask for mercy in earnestness and truth.  As his companions saw his struggles, they left him for a few minutes to his own thoughts.

“Molly,” Spike at length uttered, in a faint tone, the voice of one conscious of being very near his end, “I hope you will forgive me, Molly.  I know you must have a hard, hard time of it.”

“It is hard for a woman to unsex herself, Stephen; to throw off her very natur’, as it might be, and to turn man.”

“It has changed you sadly—­even your speech is altered.  Once your voice was soft and womanish—­more like that of Rose Budd’s than it is now.”