His Other Wife: A Novel — page 285: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A VULTURE ON GUARD. 277 but, man like, he construed her enthused manner to the advantage of his own vanity. The captain was not a bad talker when animated by a congenial theme. His voice was good, and excitement lit his sinister and somber countenance into a certain satanic beauty, which is to the last degree captivating to admirers of the brigand order of man. Faith Hilary was far from belonging to this type of woman, nevertheless her imaginative fancy was deeply arrested by the daring tale which the bold seaman nar- rated, weaving some of the most thrilling facts of his eventful life very cleverly into a romantic tissue of incident that placed him rather in the light of a fate-driven Orestes than the bad, unscrupulous man that he was. Possibly he painted his life history with the colors of his own palliative sophistries, which, no doubt, represented his deeds to his own mind less as willful crimes than the evil chances of a desperate calling to which he had been pre- destined. | It seemed to Faith, as she listened, that it was a legend of fiction, with a wild sea-robber for its hero, that was being told by the captain. Sometimes she held her breath, and turned pale with horror, as he portrayed the perils by land and sea through which he had escaped death in its ghastliest shapes, and in which he had been /orced to inflict it on those who endan- gered his own safety. Whether by design or not, the captain spun eut his EComicbooks: (E(@)