be
the last thing I would ever do."

"Captain Lyth, you are always very good; you never should think such
things of me. I am just looking at a particular cloud. And who ever said
that you might call me 'Mary'?"

"Perhaps the particular cloud said so; but you must have been the cloud
yourself, for you told me only yesterday."

"Then I will never say another word about it; but people should not take
advantage."

"Who are people? How you talk! quite as if I were somebody you never saw
before. I should like you just to look round now, and let me see why you
are so different from yourself."

Mary Anerley looked round; for she always did what people liked, without
good reason otherwise; and if her mind was full of clouds, her eyes had
little sign of them.

"You look as lovely as you always do," said the smuggler, growing bolder
as she looked at something else. "You know long ago what my opinion of
you is, and yet you seem to take no notice. Now I must be off, as you
know, to-night; not for any reason of my own, as I told you yesterday,
but to carry out a contract. I may not see you for many months again;
and you may fall in love with a Preventive man."

"I never fall in love with anybody. Why should I go from one extreme to
the other? Captain Carroway has seven children, as well as a very active
wife."

"I am not afraid of Carroway, in love or in war. He is an honest fellow,
with no more brains than this ash-tree over us. I mean the dashing
captains who come in with their cutters, and would carry you off as soon
as look."

"Captain Lyth, you are not at all considering what you say: those
officers do not want me--they want you."

"Then they shall get neither; they may trust me for that. But, Mary, do
tell me how your heart is; you know well how mine has been for ever such
a time. I tell you downright that I have thought of girls before--"

"Oh, I was not at all aware of that; surely you had better go on with
thinking of them."

"You have not heard me out. I have only thought of them; nothing more
than thinking, in a foolish sort of way. But of you I do not think; I
seem to feel you all through me."

"What sort of a sensation do I seem to be? A foolish one, I suppose,
like all those many others."

"No, not at all. A very wise one; a regular knowledge that I can not
live without you; a certainty that I could only mope about a little--"

"And not run any more cargoes on the coast?"

"Not a single tub, nor a