“When?” asked Warenne; “to-morrow night? for heaven’s sake tell me what you have heard.” “I will,” replied Nicholas, “all in order; but the upshot is this,—that Fisherton will be plundered to-morrow night, and that there are more smugglers engaged in the business than are sufficient to set your one troop at defiance.” He then proceeded to state that he had been shooting that very morning on some property of his father’s between the Plashetts and the coast, when a woman in great distress had run up to him, and begged him to come and speak with her husband, who was dying. “He wished,” she said, “to speak to some clergyman, or magistrate, or to Mr. Nicholas.” Nicholas accordingly accompanied her to her cottage, where he found a poor fellow, to whom his father had behaved with much kindness the previous winter, lying with both his legs broken, and his back severely injured, from a fall of ground in a chalk-pit. Clarke, for that was his name, was in great agony, and evidently could not live many hours. On seeing Nicholas, and receiving his condolences, he said, “My body is bad enough, to be sure, but it is nothing to my mind. I could not die easy till I had seen you, Mr. John. Tell the women to leave the room, sir. I must speak to you; if I die before I make a clean breast, I can never find no mercy. Why don’t the women leave the room?” repeated he fiercely. “Now, then, they are gone, and no one is here but ourselves. Come nearer to me, if you please, sir. You know, sir, about our nightly meetings. I have been one as has regularly attended them. God forgive me, I wish I had never heard of them. Last night, sir, last night,” as he repeated the word he raised himself in his bed, casting his eyes inquiringly about the room, as if he dreaded a witness to his disclosure, and sank his voice to a whisper, “it was agreed that we should make an attack on Fisherton as to-morrow night. The troops are changed to-morrow: the one as is at Fisherton goes to Calbury, and the Charnstead one comes into Fisherton; and we reckoned that the new men would not know the ground, and having just marched in, would be tired, and off their guard. So we settled to collect together at certain places after dusk, and then, in company with the smugglers, who were to join us there, to enter the town, and set fire to it in several parts, and plunder it in the confusion. That ever I should have agreed to such wickedness! I never should, Mr. John—I never should, if I had not been fool enough to listen to those villains, who persuaded us that we were all deprived of our rights by the rich, and that it was appointed that we should all share and share alike. I see it all quite different now. Do you think, sir, I shall ever be forgiven?”