t two o'clock to-morrow
morning. Hand over your cases of treasure to him without hesitation,
and he will take care of them for you. He knows exactly how to manage
the business, trust him, for he was a smuggler in his youth, when
smuggling was still a paying business, as were his forbears for
generations before him; so it is in the man's blood, you see."

And as Mr Richards had said, so it proved. The night was, luckily,
_very_ dark, and therefore exactly suited to our purpose; and promptly
at two o'clock, the man White, with his fleet of "lerrets," came gliding
noiselessly alongside out of the darkness, and in less than half an hour
every ounce of the treasure was out of the ship, with nobody a bit the
wiser. The next morning a man came alongside offering crabs for sale,
and before leaving the ship, he slipped a crumpled, dirty piece of
note-paper, smelling strongly of fish, into my hand; upon opening which
I, with some difficulty, deciphered the following communication:--

"Deer Sur the boxis be awl rite yours to command T. White."

Is there anything else to tell? Well, yes; there is just one further
item of information that may interest some at least of my readers. I
remember remarking, in the course of my narrative, that toward the
latter part of my acquaintance with Miss Merrivale--dating particularly
from the capture and recapture of the ship at the treasure island--that
very charming young lady's demeanour toward me underwent a certain
subtle, indefinable, puzzling, but exceedingly agreeable change; and
after we had left China and were on our homeward voyage--when, in short,
I had leisure to give a proper amount of thought and attention to so
important a matter--I determined to ascertain what it meant.

Now, this is not a love story, so I will not enter into the particulars
of how I first of all fell to questioning myself as to _why_ this change
of manner should have proved so agreeable to me; nor will I describe the
mental process by which I quickly arrived at the conclusion that it was
because Agnes Merrivale was, beyond all question, the sweetest and most
lovable, as well as the most charming and lovely woman it had ever been
my good fortune to encounter. Nor will I attempt to describe the
devious methods and the complicated stratagems by which--having arrived
at this conclusion--I painfully sought to obtain some slight inkling or
clue to the sweet girl's sentiments toward myself. Let it suffice to
s