"Poor Abel! he's very bitter and cruel; poor--Yes, do you want me?" "Genlum give me this to give you," said a boy. Mary excitedly caught at the letter the boy handed to her, and opening it with trembling hands, managed with no little difficulty to spell out its contents. They were very short and laboriously written in a large schoolboy-like hand for her special benefit by one who knew her deficiencies of education. "It is not too late yet. Abel will be tried to-morrow and condemned unless a piece of sea-weed is received to-night." "And I used to love him and believe in him!" she cried at last passionately, as her hot indignation at last mastered her, and she tore the letter in pieces with her teeth, spat the fragments upon the ground, and stamped upon them with every mark of contempt and disgust. Then a change came over her, and she sank sobbing upon a stool, to burst forth into a piteous wail. "Oh, Abel!--brother!--it is all my doing. I have sent you to your death!" CHAPTER TEN. A DARING TRICK. The laws were tremendously stringent in those days when it was considered much easier to bring an offender's bad career to an end than to keep him at the nation's expense, and when the stealing of a sheep was considered a crime to be punished with death, an attack upon the sacred person of one of the king's officers by a couple of notorious law-breakers was not likely to be looked upon leniently by a judge well-known for stern sentences. But a jury of Devon men was sitting upon the offence of Abel Dell and Bart Wrigley, and feeling disposed to deal easily with a couple of young fellows whose previous bad character was all in connection with smuggling, a crime with the said jury of a very light dye, certainly not black. Abel and Bart escaped the rope, and were sentenced to transportation to one of His Majesty's colonies in the West Indies, there to do convict work in connection with plantations, or the making of roads, as their taskmasters might think fit. Time glided by, and Mary Dell found that her life at home had become insupportable. She was not long in finding that, now that she was left alone and unprotected, she was not to be free from persecution. Her contemptuous rejection of Captain Armstrong's advances seemed to have the effect of increasing his persecution; and one evening at the end of a couple of months Mary Dell sat on one of the rocks outside the cottage door, gazing out to sea, and watching the ships sail westward, as she wondered whether those on board would ever see the brother who seemed to be all that was left to her in this world. That particular night the thought which had been hatching in her brain ever since Abel had been sent away flew forth fully fledged and ready, and she rose from where she had been sitting in the evening sunshine, and walked into the cottage.