“No, sir. All well, sir.”

Hornblower rapped on the door behind him to be let out of prison, to be conducted by his guard back to his room again, where he could walk up and down, three steps each way, his brain seething like a pot on a fire. He only knew enough to unsettle him, to make him anxious. Leighton had been wounded, but that did not mean that he would die. A splinter wound—that might mean much or little. Yet he had been carried below. No admiral would have allowed that, if he had been able to resist—not in the heat of a fight, at any rate. His face might be lacerated or his belly torn open—Hornblower, shuddering, shook his mind free from the memories of all the horrible wounds he had seen received on ship board during twenty years’ service. But, coldbloodedly, it was an even chance that Leighton would die—Hornblower had signed too many casualty lists to be unaware of the chances of a wounded man’s recovery.

If Leighton were to die, Barbara would be free again. But what had that to do with him, a married man—a married man whose wife was pregnant? She would be no nearer to him, not while Maria lived. And yet it assuaged his jealousy to think of her as a widow. But then perhaps she would marry again, and he would have to go once more through all the torment he had endured when he had first heard of her marriage to Leighton. In that case he would rather Leighton lived—a cripple, perhaps mutilated or impotent; the implications of that train of thought drove him into a paroxysm of too-rapid thinking from which he only emerged after a desperate struggle for sanity.

In the cold reaction which followed he sneered at himself for a fool. He was the prisoner of a man whose empire extended from the Baltic to Gibraltar. He told himself he would be an old man, that his child and Maria’s would be grown up before he regained his liberty. And then with a sudden shock he remembered that he might soon be dead—shot for violation of the laws of war. Strange how he could forget that possibility. Sneering, he told himself that he had a coward’s mind which could leave the imminence of death out of its calculations because the possibility was too monstrous to bear contemplation.