‘I don’t do it always. I only do it in winter-time when ’tis new moon.’ ‘Well, I suppose that’s because it can’t be done anywhen else . . . You have regularly upset me, Lizzy.’ ‘I am sorry for that,’ Lizzy meekly replied. ‘Well now,’ said he more tenderly, ‘no harm is done as yet. Won’t you for the sake of me give up this blamable and dangerous practice altogether?’ ‘I must do my best to save this run,’ said she, getting rather husky in the throat. ‘I don’t want to give you up—you know that; but I don’t want to lose my venture. I don’t know what to do now! Why I have kept it so secret from you is that I was afraid you would be angry if you knew.’ ‘I should think so! I suppose if I had married you without finding this out you’d have gone on with it just the same?’ ‘I don’t know. I did not think so far ahead. I only went to-night to burn the folks off, because we found that the excisemen knew where the tubs were to be landed.’ ‘It is a pretty mess to be in altogether, is this,’ said the distracted young minister. ‘Well, what will you do now?’ Lizzy slowly murmured the particulars of their plan, the chief of which were that they meant to try their luck at some other point of the shore the next night; that three landing-places were always agreed upon before the run was attempted, with the understanding that, if the vessel was ‘burnt off’ from the first point, which was Ringsworth, as it had been by her to-night, the crew should attempt to make the second, which was Lulstead Cove, on the second night; and if there, too, danger threatened, they should on the third night try the third place, which was behind a headland further west. ‘Suppose the officers hinder them landing there too?’ he said, his attention to this interesting programme displacing for a moment his concern at her share in it. ‘Then we shan’t try anywhere else all this dark—that’s what we call the time between moon and moon—and perhaps they’ll string the tubs to a stray-line, and sink ’em a little-ways from shore, and take the bearings; and then when they have a chance they’ll go to creep for ’em.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘O, they’ll go out in a boat and drag a creeper—that’s a grapnel—along the bottom till it catch hold of the stray-line.’ The minister stood thinking; and there was no sound within doors but the tick of the clock on the stairs, and the quick breathing of Lizzy, partly from her walk and partly from agitation, as she stood close to the wall, not in such complete darkness but that he could discern against its whitewashed surface the greatcoat and broad hat which covered her. ‘Lizzy, all this is very wrong,’ he said. ‘Don’t you remember the lesson of the tribute-money? “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Surely you have heard that read times enough in your growing up?’ ‘He’s dead,’ she pouted. ‘But the spirit of the text is in force just the same.’