efore
them, the captain suggested that Minnie, Ruby, and himself should be
landed within a mile of the town, and left to find their way thither on
foot. This was agreed to; and while the one party walked home by the
romantic pathway at the top of the cliffs, the other rowed away to
explore the dark recesses of the Forbidden Cave.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

THE BELL ROCK AGAIN--A DREARY NIGHT IN A STRANGE HABITATION.

During that winter Ruby Brand wrought diligently in the workyard at the
lighthouse materials, and, by living economically, began to save a small
sum of money, which he laid carefully by with a view to his marriage
with Minnie Gray.

Being an impulsive man, Ruby would have married Minnie, then and there,
without looking too earnestly to the future. But his mother had advised
him to wait till he should have laid by a little for a "rainy day." The
captain had recommended patience, tobacco, and philosophy, and had
enforced his recommendations with sundry apt quotations from dead and
living novelists, dramatists, and poets. Minnie herself, poor girl,
felt that she ought not to run counter to the wishes of her best and
dearest friends, so she too advised delay for a "little time"; and Ruby
was fain to content himself with bewailing his hard lot internally, and
knocking Jamie Dove's bellows, anvils, and sledge-hammers about in a way
that induced that son of Vulcan to believe his assistant had gone mad!

As for big Swankie, he hid his ill-gotten gains under the floor of his
tumble-down cottage, and went about his evil courses as usual in company
with his comrade Davy Spink, who continued to fight and make it up with
him as of yore.

It must not be supposed that Ruby forgot the conversation he had
overheard in the Gaylet Cove. He and Minnie and his uncle had frequent
discussions in regard to it, but to little purpose; for although Swankie
and Spink had discovered old Mr Brand's body on the Bell Rock, it did
not follow that any jewels or money they had found there were
necessarily his. Still Ruby could not divest his mind of the feeling
that there was some connexion between the two, and he was convinced,
from what had fallen from Davy Spink about "silver teapots and things",
that Swankie was the man of whose bad deeds he himself had been
suspected.

As there seemed no possibility of bringing the matter home to him,
however, he resolved to dismiss the whole affair from his mind in the
meantime.

Things