did not come here for ideas of this kind," said Mary, with her lips
as red as pyracanthine berries; "free trade was bad enough, but the
Royal Navy worse, it seems. Now, Robin dear, be sensible, and tell me
what I am to do."

"To listen to me, and then say whether I deserve what my father has done
to me. He came back from India--as you must understand--with no other
object in life, that I can hear of (for he had any quantity of money),
than to find out me, his only child, and the child of the only wife
he ever could put up with. For twenty years he had believed me to be
drowned, when the ship he sent me home in to be educated was supposed
to have foundered, with all hands. But something made him fancy that I
might have escaped; and as he could not leave India then, he employed a
gentleman of York, named Mordacks, to hunt out all about it. Mordacks,
who seems to be a wonderful man, and most kind-hearted to everybody,
as poor Widow Carroway says of him with tears, and as he testifies of
himself--he set to work, and found out in no time all about me and my
ear-rings, and my crawling from the cave that will bear my name, they
say, and more things than I have time to tell. He appointed a meeting
with Sir Duncan Yordas here at Flamborough, and would have brought me to
him, and everything might have been quite happy. But in the mean while
that horrible murder of poor Carroway came to pass, and I was obliged to
go into hiding, as no one knows better than you, my dear. My father (as
I suppose I must call him) being bound, as it seems that they all are,
to fall out with their children, took a hasty turn against me at once.
Mordacks, whom I saw last week, trusting myself to his honor, tells me
that Sir Duncan would not have cared twopence about my free-trade work,
and so on, or even about my having killed the officer in fair conflict,
for he is used to that. But he never will forgive me for absconding, and
leaving my fellows, as he puts it, to bear the brunt. He says that I am
a dastard and a skulk, and unworthy to bear the name of Yordas."

"What a wicked, unnatural man he must be!" cried Mary. "He deserves to
have no children."

"No; I am told that he is a very good man, but stiff-necked and
disdainful. He regards me with scorn, because he knows no better. He may
know our laws, but he knows nothing of our ways, to suppose that my men
were in any danger. If I had been caught while the stir was on, a gibbet
on the cliff would hav