At about three o'clock in the afternoon the frigate fired one of her bow guns apparently at the Minorca, a stern, laconic message to her to heave to; for hours ago it was perceived that the chase was the vessel Captain Acton and the Admiral were hunting; and for hours[Pg 431] it must have been known aboard the barque that one of the pursuing ships was a frigate heavily armed, and the other a fabric perfectly familiar to every man in the Minorca, as the three-masted schooner Aurora, the property of the owner of the barque.,
The gallant old officer paused and looked at his son, and any one could have easily seen that he was equally moved by pain and pride. Indeed the man who sat opposite to him was one who by manly beauty of face, worn as it was by weather and excess, by vigorous bearing of shapely person, and by a story which, brief as it was, was as full of the stars of gallant deeds as a short scope of wake is[Pg 57] alive with the brilliant pulses of the sea-glow, was one, let it be repeated, whom many a father's heart would rejoice in, and approve of, bitterly as it must deplore those lamentable, if fashionable, weaknesses, gambling and a love of what Dibdin calls the "flowing can.",
"But what is to happen to him," said Lucy, "if you carry him back to England? I would rather hear," she cried, with an emphasis which may have borrowed note and complexion from the impulse of her late impersonations of madness, "of the Minorca having sunk and carried him down to the bottom of the sea with her, than live to witness his degradation and perhaps his death and the misery and the broken-heartedness that must come to his dear old father, if you do not prove his friend, and help to reclaim a nature that in its essence is beautiful, and a fulfilment of the purest woman's ideal.".
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