“Where used you to live when you were on the schooner?” she asked Emily one day suddenly.

“Oh, in the hold,” said Emily nonchalantly. “Is that your Great-uncle Vaughan , did you say?”

In the hold. She might have known it. Chained, probably, down there in the darkness like blacks, with rats running over them, fed on bread and water.

“Were you very frightened when there was a battle going on? Did you hear them fighting over your head?”

Emily looked at her with her gentle stare: but kept silence.

Louisa Dawson was very wise in thus trying to ease the load on the child’s mind. But also she was consumed with curiosity. It exasperated her that Emily would not talk.