"You dear, delightful old fibber!" she remarked. "I don't believe you dreamed that at all. You couldn't." Then she wheeled round on me. "Now tell me, Mr. Sutgrove, didn't that dream of father's really happen to you last night?"

   What course was open to me but confession? I admitted the truth of the story, and the Colonel was so choked with merriment, that I feared lest he should be stricken with apoplexy.

   "The cream of the joke," he explained, when he recovered his powers of speech, "was that neither Winter nor Sutgrove had the slightest idea that I was foxing. I intended to inform them directly we were clear of the Pirate; but when I heard them discussing the matter, and determining to keep silence out of tenderness for my reputation, I could not resist keeping up the joke."

   "I should think it was their own reputations they were thinking about," said his daughter. "To submit so tamely to one man is not a very heroic proceeding."

   I heard Mannering chuckle, and I felt mad. But I fancy it was not Mannering's amusement, but my

   own consciousness of the truth of the criticism that galled.

   Colonel Maitland came to my rescue. "I thought they were very sensible," he said. "Even a cripple with a gun is better than six sound Tommies unarmed."

   "Sensible—yes," she replied scornfully. "But there are times when one prefers a little less sense, and a little more—shall we say action. I am sure you would not have obeyed so tamely?" she continued, turning to Mannering.

   He smiled, and I felt as if it would give me exquisite pleasure to catch him by the throat, and twist the smile out of his dark, handsome face.

   "Really, Miss Maitland," he replied, "you flatter me. You should not be too hard on Sutgrove. I am sure that it was only the full comprehension of his own helplessness which prevented him making a fight of it. What could he have done?"

   "Oh, a man should always know what to do!" she answered petulantly. "Has any one ever tried to hold you up?"

   "Well, yes," he answered. "Once when I was out in the west of the States, some of the regulation bands tried the game on a train in which I was travelling. But then, you see, the conductor in the railway-car in which I happened to be seated had a six-shooter. So had I. The other 

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