His calculations were well made, and if we had not noticed that
brigantine at Cowes, and I had not had the luck to come upon some
of his crew and pick up his track, he might have been successful."
"You don't think that I should ever have consented to marry him?"
Bertha said, indignantly.
"I am sure that such a thought never entered your head, Bertha; but
you cannot tell what the effect of a hopeless captivity would have
had upon you. The fellow had judged you well, and he saw that the
attitude of respect he adopted would afford him a far better chance
of winning you, than roughness or threats would do. But he might
have resorted to them afterwards, and you were so wholly and
absolutely in his power, that you would almost have been driven to
accept the alternative and become his wife."
She shook her head decidedly.
"I would have killed him first," she said. "I suppose some girls
would say, 'I would have killed myself;' but I should not have
thought of that--at any rate not until I had failed to kill him.
Every woman has the same right to defend herself that a man has,
and I should have no more felt that I was to blame, if I had killed
him, than you would do when you killed a man who had done you no
individual harm, in battle.
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