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The Admiral stood looking as though petrified. All the wrath that was in him, all the fierce and terrible thoughts which had raged in his heart and prepared his tongue for a delivery desperate and fearful in the mouth of a father, melted, vanished, faded as smoke in the air, as a shred of mist torn from a cloud in the sky, and his face wore an expression of unutterable grief, of horror beyond expression in words, every passion and emotion it displayed being irradiated by the light of a father's love which had seemed to be waning and expiring in its socket, but which found life and power in that mute, irresistible prayer addressed to him as a father by an only son whose valour[Pg 438] he had honoured, whose beauty he was proud of, whose life appealed to him more deeply in that his career had been halted by an act of folly when his reputation stood high for heroic daring. He went to the side of the body; he looked down upon the face with tearless eyes, and with that same dry sob in his throat which Captain Acton had heard when the poor old gentleman spoke after Mr Greyquill's visit, then sank upon his knees beside his son, muttering: "Walter, oh, Walter, that it should have come to this! I loved you, my son—may God pity me, and have mercy upon you!", He approached Miss Acton's door. Lucy was seated on a locker under a window, three of which embellished the stern of the Minorca. The ocean as the ship lightly depressed her stern, was visible through this window, a blue field decked with flowers of foam that rose and sank. The large glazed space filled the cabin with light, which trembled with the pulse of the white wake streaming fan-wise, and with the shivering of the sunlight into splinters of diamond brilliance by the fretful motions of the breeze-brushed waters., "That is no answer, sir," she cried. "You have basely and cruelly stolen me from my home. I command you to return me to my father! Is this your gratitude for his goodness to you and the affectionate regard he has for Sir William Lawrence, who will be more shocked than even Captain Acton by your unnatural, ignoble, treacherous conduct? Home cannot be far, the ship has not sailed many miles. Return me at once, sir! Ships must be in sight, any one of which will put me ashore. If you detain me, if you carry me I know not where in the hope of my marrying you, you will drive me mad, as I nearly am mad now," and when she spoke these words, she delivered a wild, shrieking laugh, baring her teeth by such strenuous elongation of her lips as left them ashen; and the tragic quality of that ringing dreadful laugh was heightened by the absence of the faintest stroke of merriment in her features..