why then
this secrecy?"

She bit her lip; but it trembled. "What is it you accuse him of?" she
asked, with a stamp of her foot.

"Listen to me," said Rupert gently, "it is the kinder thing that you
should know the truth, and believe me, every word I say I can
substantiate. This Captain Jack Smith, whatever his real name may be,
was picked up when a mere boy by an old Liverpool merchant, starving
in the streets of that town. This merchant, by name Cochrane, an
absurd person who gave himself out to be a relative of Cochrane of
Shaws, adopted the boy and started him upon a slaver, that is a ship
which does trade in negro slaves, my dear--a pretty trade. He next
entered a privateer's ship as lieutenant. You know what these
are--ocean freebooters, tolerated by government for the sake of the
harm they wreck upon the ships of whatever nation we may happen to be
at war with--a sort of pirate ship--hardly a much more reputable
business than the slaver's; but Captain Smith made himself a name in
it. Now that the war is over, he has taken to a lower traffic
still--that of smuggling."

"But _what_ is smuggling?" cried the girl, tears brimming up at last
into her pretty eyes, and all her heat of valiance suddenly gone.
"What does it mean?"

"What is smuggling? Bless your innocence! I beg your pardon, my
dear--miss I should say--but if you'll allow _me_ I think I'm the man
to explain that 'ere to you." The husky mellifluous tones of the
preventive-service man, who had crept up unnoticed to listen to the
conversation, here murmured insinuatingly in her ear.

Rupert hesitated; then reading shrinking aversion upon Madeleine's
face, shrewdly conjectured that the exposition of her lover's doings
might come with more force from Mr. Hobson's lips than from his own,
and allowed the latter to proceed unmolested.

"Smuggling, my pretty," wheezed the genial representative of the
custom laws, "again asking pardon, but it slipped out, smuggling is,
so to say, a kind of stealing, a kind of cheating and that of a most
rank and heinous kind. For, mind you, it ain't stealing from a common
man, nor from the likes of you and me, nor from a nobleman either:
it's cheating and stealing from his most gracious Majesty himself. For
see you, how 'tis, his Majesty he says, 'Every keg of brandy,' says
he, 'and every yard of lace and every pipe o' tobacco as is brought
into this here country shall be paid for, so much on, to me, and
that's called a tax