And now the tumult lessens. Most of the villagers have fled, and ten men of those who had manned the _Lapwing_ stand bound upon the beach. Crumblejohn has long since staggered off, and subsided, blue with fright, in a ditch, to be picked up by the Excise men some fifty yards or more from the scene of the encounter, to be marched more briskly than his failing senses would have thought possible, along the road, hands bound, to his own Inn. And Thurot, the gallant Thurot, with arms flung wide on either side of him, lies dead, in his faded uniform, beside a blackened torch. But there is another corpse. It lies distressfully. The form is contorted, so that you may barely see the masked face. Yet it should not be difficult to identify this body. There is a finger lacking to the right hand. CHAPTER XXV _O day, pass gently that art here again, Turn memory’s spear, and may thy vespers close Upon a twilight odorous of the rose, Drooping her petals in the falling rain._ _There is no virtue in remembered pain, The past is sleeping. Watching its repose I shudder, lest those weary lids unclose, And I be folded in its coils again._ One evening the children were gathered in the drawing-room, and Miss Ross sat among them working at her tambour frame. She wore a slender gold thimble set with corals, and in a slanting, almost obliterated handwriting, the posie, “_Use me, nor lose me_,” was writ around its base. This thimble had been her mother’s, and when her work was done for the evening, she would shut it away in a narrow case that held her scissors, and needlecase, and bodkin; and this case was lined with velvet that had faded to the colour of silver weed when the wind reverses it. “We should feel indebted to Mrs. Inchbald,” she was saying, “for telling us so spirited a tale. I found my share of entertainment in watching your faces the while. Bimbo, I take it, will do well in life to set himself a fine example, for his sympathies are sufficiently fluid to shape themselves according to their groove. Let him see that they flow in a fine mould. While Mrs. Inchbald spoke of Ratface, his chin receded, his eyes narrowed, and I momentarily expected his ears to change their position on his head. Later, when she sketched for us the brave Thurot, his very shoulders broadened, his eye lightened, and his jaw set square. None of you, I noticed, found it in your heart to compliment her on the picture of Miss Augusta Noble’s cousin, the spoilt child.” “I wish I’d asked her, though,” said Christopher, “what they did to smugglers when they were caught.”