At that minute there were voices heard without and the captain started and looked nervously at the door. "I'm going, James Armstrong," said the girl; "and I might go like this; but for my own sake, not for yours, I'll not." She gave her head a sidewise jerk which brought her magnificent black hair over her left shoulder, and then with a few rapid turns of her hands she twisted it into a coil and secured it at the back of her head. Then turning to go, Humphrey took a step after her; but she looked up at him with a sharp, suspicious gaze. "He told you to see me off the place?" she said quickly. "No," cried Humphrey; "it was my own idea." "Let me go alone," said the girl. "I want to think there is someone belonging to him who is not base. Good-bye, sir! Perhaps we may meet again." "Meet again!" snarled the captain as the girl passed through the doorway. "Yes, I'll warrant me you will, and console yourself with your new lover, you jade." "Look here, Jem," cried the lieutenant hotly; "officer or no officer, recollect that we're alone now, and that you are insulting me as well as that poor girl. Now, then, you say another word like that, and hang me if I don't nearly break your neck." "You insolent--" Captain Armstrong did not finish his sentence, for there was a something in the frank, handsome, manly face of his cousin that meant mischief, and he threw himself into a chair with an angry snarl, such as might be given by a dog who wanted to attack but did not dare. CHAPTER TWO. AT THE COTTAGE. "What's she a-doing of now?" "Blubbering." "Why, that's what you said yesterday. She ar'n't been a-blubbering ever since?" "Yes, she have, Bart; and the day afore, and the day afore that. She's done nothing else." "I hates to see a woman cry," said the first speaker in a low, surly growl, as he wrinkled his forehead all over and seated himself on the edge of a three-legged table in the low-ceiled cottage of old Dell, the smuggler, a roughly-built place at the head of one of the lonely coves on the South Devon coast. The place was rough, for it had been built at different times, of wreckwood which had come ashore; but the dwelling was picturesque outside, and quaint, nautical, and deliriously clean within, where Abel Dell, Mary's twin brother, a short, dark young fellow, singularly like his sister, sat upon an old sea-chest forming a netting-needle with a big clasp-knife, and his brow was also covered with the lines of trouble.