Here William entered and Mr. Percival Jones broke off abruptly.  He disliked William.

“Ah! here comes our little friend.  He looks pale.  Remorse, my young friend?  Ah, beware of untruthfulness.  Beware of the beginnings of a life of lies and deception.”  He laid a hand on William’s head and cold shivers ran down William’s spine. “’Be good, sweet child, and let who will be clever,’ as the poet says.”  There was murder in William’s heart.

At that minute Ethel entered.

“No,” she snapped.  “I sat next a man who smelt of bad tobacco.  I hate men who smoke bad tobacco.”

Mr. Jones assumed an expression of intense piety.

“I may boast,” he said sanctimoniously, “that I have never thus soiled my lips with drink or smoke ...”

There was an approving murmur from the occupants of the drawing-room.

William had met his father in the passage outside the drawing-room.  Mr. Brown was wearing a hunted expression.

“Can I go into the drawing-room?” he said bitterly, “or is he bleating away in there?”

They listened.  From the drawing-room came the sound of a high-pitched voice.

Mr. Brown groaned.

“Good Lord!” he moaned.  “And I’m here for a rest cure and he comes bleating into every room in the house.  Is the smoking-room safe?  Does he smoke?”

Mr. Percival Jones was feeling slightly troubled in his usually peaceful conscience.  He could honestly say that he had never smoked.  He could honestly say that he had never drank.  But in his bedroom reposed two bottles of brandy, purchased at the advice of an aunt “in case of emergencies.”  In his bedroom also was a box of cigars that he had bought for a cousin’s birthday gift, but which his conscience had finally forbidden to present.  He decided to consign these two emblems of vice to the waves that very evening.

Meanwhile William had returned to the hut and was composing a tale of smugglers by the light of a candle.  He was much intrigued by his subject.  He wrote fast in an illegible hand in great sloping lines, his brows frowning, his tongue protruding from his mouth as it always did in moments of mental strain.

His sympathies wavered between the smugglers and the representatives of law and order.  His orthography was the despair of his teachers.

"‘Ho,’ sez Dick Savage," he wrote. "Ho!  Gadzooks!  Rol in the bottles of beer up the beech.  Fill your pockets with the baccy from the bote.  Quick, now!  Gadzooks!  Methinks we are observed!” He glared round in the darkness.  In less time than wot it takes to rite this he was srounded by pleese-men and stood, proud and defiant, in the light of there electrick torches wot they had wiped quick as litening from their busums.

"‘Surrender!’ cried one, holding a gun at his brain and a drorn sord at his hart, ’Surrender or die!’

"‘Never,’ said Dick Savage, throwing back his head, proud and defiant, ’Never.  Do to me wot you will, you dirty dogs, I will never surrender.  Soner will I die.’