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 girl's hopeless rejoinder. "We must stay here prisoners, as much prisoners as though we were cooped up in a quartel, for a whole day and a whole night! We are here, worse than helpless, until the Princeton comes!"

She came to a stop, and shuddered a little.

"Oh, believe me," she told him, in her tense and low-toned voice, "believe me, I am not a coward! …… But anything, anything, can happen on this ship to-night!"

The intentness with which he was studying her face brought her wondering eyes up to his. "I'm afraid you've got to be very brave," he said, as gently as he could.

"Yes ..... I know," she said, a little brokenly.

"But braver in a different way," he amended.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because you and I are going to break this quarantine to-night!"

She looked from him to the smoke-columns that hung over Parroto, and then back at the carbine-rack and the brass guns of the comandante's smoke-belching ship-of-war.

"We can't," she said, with a little gasp of despair. "We would have no chance. There is no place to go to—and they will have orders to shoot. It would be giving them the chance they are waiting for. We can't go!"