Prosaic as their conversation had been since they left the farmhouse, there was an undercurrent of deep feeling in both their hearts which lent a vivid interest to their commonplace words. To Tregenna there was thrilling, sweetest music in every tone of the voice of this young girl, who had exposed herself so undauntedly to danger in the determination to save him from the results of his own daring. While to Joan, careful as she was to speak stiffly and even coldly, there was a secret delight in the knowledge of the real peril from which she had saved her handsome companion. He was, however, loth to accept her invitation to stay at the Parsonage, fearing that he might, by so doing, bring the vengeance of the smugglers on the heads of both father and daughter. She made light of this fear; but finally, at her urgent entreaties, he agreed to go home with her in the first place, and to take Parson Langney’s advice as to going further that night or not. Hardly had this been settled between the two young people, when the horse they rode pricked up his ears, rousing the attention of his riders. They had now left the open fields, and were passing through a wild bit of country where knots of trees, well-grown hedges, and clumps of bramble made it difficult for them to see far in any direction, and formed, moreover, safe hiding-places where an enemy might lie in ambush unperceived and unsuspected. In the distance, before them a little to the left, lay the marshes, with the white vapor rolling over them from the sea. Tregenna reined in the horse to reconnoiter. Trees on the right, a hedge on the left of the miry road. Not a living creature to be seen. In the copse, however, there was a rustling and crackling to be heard, which might be the result of the night-wind, or might not. “Let us draw back,” said Joan, in a whisper “and go straight down to the marsh and up to Hurst that way!” Tregenna assented, and was in the very act of turning the horse, when there was a shout, a hoarse cry, and a man sprang out from the copse: the next moment the lieutenant’s bridle was seized by Ben the Blast, who was no horseman, and who chose, therefore, to do his part of the work on foot. At the very moment, however, that he sprang out from his ambush, a couple of horsemen appeared, the one behind, the other in front of Tregenna; while a third, galloping up the road, joined his comrades, and, presenting a pistol at the lieutenant, shouted to his comrades to shoot him down. The newcomer was Jack Price, whose tears and maudlin protests at the farmhouse had excited the derision of his comrades. “Hold your hands!” shouted Tregenna back. “Do you not see whom I have with me? There is none here, I am very sure, would harm Parson Langney’s daughter?” “Nay,” cried out one of the horsemen, whom, by the voice, Tregenna knew to be Tom; “we’ll not harm her. But thou shalt not shelter thyself behind a woman’s petticoats!”