explanation of the fancy he had felt,
that he must be ill and sea-sick again, and that somebody had been
giving him brandy.

Part was fevered imagination, part was reality, for there could be no
doubt about that faint odour of spirits. It was brandy, but brandy in
smuggled kegs, and the scoundrels of smugglers had shut him up in the
vault with their kegs.

"Well, they have not killed me," he said to himself with a little laugh.
"They dared not try that, and all I have to do now is to escape, if Mr
Brough does not send the lads to fetch me out."

He went through the whole time now since his landing; thought of what a
disgraceful thing it was for a titled gentleman to mix himself up with
smuggling, and what a revelation he would have for the lieutenant and
the master who had been so easily deluded by Sir Risdon's bearing.

Then he thought of Celia, and how bright and innocent she had seemed;
putting away all thoughts of her, however, directly as his angry feeling
increased against Ram and this treacherous girl.

He must have been for hours thinking, often in a drowsy, half-confused
way, but rousing up from time to time to feel his resentment growing
against Ram, who seemed to him now to be the personification of the
whole smuggling gang.

By degrees he grew conscious of a fresh pain, one that was certainly not
produced by his late struggles, or by stiffness from lying upon an old
sail stretched upon the damp floor of a vault.

As he thought this last, he asked himself why he called it the damp
floor of a vault. For it was not damp, but perfectly dry, and below the
scraps of stone in the seam there was fine dust.

But the said pain was increasing, and there was no mistaking it. He was
hungry, decidedly hungry; and paradoxically, as he grew better he grew
worse, the pain in the head being condensed in a more central region,
where nature carries on a kind of factory of bone, muscle, flesh, blood,
and generally health and strength.

Suddenly Archy recalled that his legs had been bound, and he sat up to
find that they were free now, and if he liked he could rise and go to
the grated window and call for help.

"If I do, they'll come down and stuff a handkerchief in my mouth again,"
he thought, "and it is no use to do that. I may as well wait till I
hear our men's voices, and then I'll soon let them know where I am."

He got on his feet, feeling stiff and uncomfortable, and then tried to
make out where the grate