"I have met none other. Perhaps I have sought none other--all my own fault, they will tell you where my father is; where," he added, bitterly, "they are worse than I am, and yet, oh, so respectable." "You turned highwayman to--to--" "To spite them, say. It is very near the truth." "It will be a poor excuse to the mother, when you see her again." "Eh?" But Sophie had no time to continue so abstruse a subject with this misanthropical freebooter. She clapped her hand to her side and gave a little squeak of astonishment. "What is the matter?" asked Captain Guy. "My keys! They have taken my keys." And, sure enough, while Sophie Tarne had been talking to the captain, some one had severed the keys from her girdle and made off with them, and there was only a clean-cut black ribbon dangling at her waist instead. "That villain Stango," exclaimed the captain "I saw him pass a minute ago. He leaned over and whispered to you, Kits. You remember?" "Stango?" said Kits, with far too innocent an expression to be genuine. "Yes, Stango; you know he did." "I dare say he did. I don't gainsay it, Captain, but I don't know where he has gone." "But _I_ will know," cried the captain, striking his hand upon the table and making every glass and plate jump thereon. "I will have no tricks played here without my consent. Am I your master, or are you all mine?" And here, we regret to say, Captain Guy swore a good deal, and became perfectly unheroic and inelegant and unromantic. But his oaths had more effect upon his unruly followers than his protests, and they sat looking at him in a half-sullen, half-shamefaced manner, and would have probably succumbed to his influence had not attention been diverted and aroused by the reappearance of Stango, who staggered in with four or five great black bottles heaped high in his arms. A tremendous shout of applause and delight heralded his return to the parlour. "We have been treated scurvily, my men," cried Stango, "exceedingly scurvily; the best and strongest stuff in the cellar has been kept back from us. It's excellent--I've been tasting it first, lest you should all be poisoned; and there's more where this come from--oceans more of it!" "Hurrah for Stango!" The captain's voice was heard once more above the uproar, but it was only for a minute longer. There was a rush of six men toward Stango; a shouting, scrambling, fighting for the spirits which he had discovered; a crash of one black bottle to the floor, with the spirit streaming over the polished boards, and the unceremonious tilting over of the upper part of the supper-table in the ruffians' wild eagerness for drink. "To horse, to horse, men! Have you forgotten how far we have to go?" cried the captain.