I took the shell from her hand, and wrote my answer beneath her question.
The forest behind us sank into that pause and breathless hush between the noises of the day and the noises of the night. The sun dropped lower, and the water became as pink as the blooms above us.
"An you could, would you change?" I asked. "Would you return to England and safety?"
She took a handful of the sand and let it slowly drift through her white fingers. "You know that I would not," she said; "not if the end were to come to-night. Only--only"--She turned from me and looked far out to sea. I could not see her face, only the dusk of her hair and her heaving bosom. "My blood may be upon your hands," she said in a whisper, "but yours will be upon my soul."
She turned yet further away, and covered her eyes with her hand. I arose, and bent over her until I could have touched with my lips that bowed head. "Jocelyn," I said.
A branch of yellow fruit fell beside us, and my Lord Carnal, a mass of gaudy bloom in his hand, stepped from the wood. "I returned to lay our first-fruits at madam's feet," he explained, his darkly watchful eyes upon us both. "A gift from one poor prisoner to another, madam." He dropped the flowers in her lap. "Will you wear them, lady? They are as fair almost as I could wish."
She touched the blossoms with listless fingers, said they were fair; then, rising, let them drop upon the sand. "I wear no flowers save of my husband's gathering, my lord," she said.
There was a pathos and weariness in her voice, and a mist of unshed tears in her eyes. She hated him; she loved me not, yet was forced to turn to me for help at every point, and she had stood for weeks upon the brink of death and looked unfalteringly into the gulf beneath her.
"My lord," I said, "you know in what direction Master Sparrow led the men. Will you reenter the wood and call them to return? The sun is fast sinking, and darkness will be upon us."
He looked from her to me, with his brows drawn downwards and his lips pressed together. Stooping, he took up the fallen flowers and deliberately tore them to pieces, until the pink petals were all scattered upon the sand.
"I am weary of requests that are but sugared commands," he said thickly. "Go seek your own men, an you will. Here we are but man to man, and I budge not. I stay, as the King would have me stay, beside the unfortunate lady whom you have made the prisoner and the plaything of a pirate ship."