“Upon my word one requires to be in training to race you, my dear Damaris,” the young man said gaily, ostentatiously mopping his forehead.  “And I’m disgracefully soft just now, I know.  You beat me utterly and ignominiously; but then you did have a good three minutes’ start.  In common honesty you can’t deny that”—­

The girl made no response, but began mounting the few sand-strewn steps on to the jetty.  He saw her face in profile, the delicate upward curve of her long dark eyelashes in the shade of her hat.  Saw, too, that her soft lips quivered as with the effort to repress an outburst of tears.  And this affected him as the wounding of some strong free creature might, stirring his blood in a fashion new to him and strange.  For not only did he find it piteous; but unseemly, unpermissible somehow, yet marvellously sweet, startling him out of all preconceived light diplomatic plans, plucking shrewdly at his complacently unawakened heart.

He came close to her, and putting his hand under her elbow gently held it.

“Pray, pray be careful,” he said.  “I don’t trust this crazy little pier of yours one atom.  Any one of these boards looks capable of crumbling and letting one through.—­And, Damaris, please don’t be cross with me or I shall be quite miserable.  Forgive my having asked you stupid questions.  I was a blundering idiot.  Of course, what I heard last night was just some echo, some trick of wind or of the river and tide.  I was half asleep and imagined the whole thing most likely, magnified sounds as one does, don’t you know, sometimes at night.  Your father talked wonderfully, and I went to bed dazzled, such imagination as I possess all aflame”—­

But Damaris shook her head, while her elbow rested rigid upon the palm of his hand.

“No—­what you heard was real,” she answered.  “I heard once myself—­and the people here know about it.  They say the dead smugglers still drive their ponies up from the beach, across the lawn where the old road was, and, as it sounds, through the round rooms downstairs, in which my father lives, on their way up into the forest.—­You cannot help seeing—­although you see nothing—­how the ponies are ill-used, hounded and flogged.  The last of the drove are lame and utterly worn out.  They stumble along anyhow and one falls.  Oh! it is cruel, wicked.  And it is—­was, really true, cousin Tom.  It must have happened scores of times before old Mr. Verity, your namesake, put a stop to the iniquity by buying The Hard—­I have only heard the ponies driven once, about this time in September last year—­just before something very sad, quite of my own, happened”—­

Damaris stopped, her lips quivering again and too much for speech.

“Don’t tell me any more.  I can’t bear you to be distressed.  Pray, pray don’t”—­the young man urged incoherently while his grasp on her elbow tightened somewhat.