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football y cross Asian Online Casino: Perfect Combination of Safety and Entertainment! Billy was silent. Should he tell the truth and say that he had carved Ann's initials on the bench and those of Walter Watland beneath them at that young lady's pleading request? No!,Anson's mouth fell open in terror. "You don't mean—" he commenced, then gulped, unable to proceed.,Her only reply to his speech was (as though she had not attended to his meaning), "Are you going to keep me a prisoner in this cabin?","Not yourn? Then whose is it?" she cried in amazement.,Mr Lawrence seemed to read the man's thoughts. Unscrupulous as was this Naval gentleman, he was an extremely clever fellow. Preserving a severe austerity of countenance, a demeanour upon which the word discipline was writ large, he exclaimed: "It is not my intention to ask you if Mr Eagle has broken his faith with me and communicated to you the confidence I imparted to him this morning. You are, sir, by virtue of your rank aboard the ship free of this cabin, and it is therefore desirable that I should trust you. The lady in yonder berth is Miss Lucy Acton, who consented to elope with me, providing it should be understood by all on board that she was being kidnapped or stolen from her home. That this should appear, it was arranged between us that she should be locked up as though she were a prisoner, and then in a day or two I should enlarge her, and she would go amongst the crew and speak of my cunning and stratagem, and her desperate lot in being torn from her father's home. All which would in due course reach her father's ears, and mollify his wrath at her giving me her hand in the existing state of my fortunes, and preserve to her the fortune she must inherit as Captain Acton's[Pg 279] only child. Now, sir," continued Mr Lawrence in his frowning, imperious way, "this is submitted to you in confidence, and it is manifestly my wish that some of the crew should credit her story that they may give the evidence we desire when they are called upon to tell what they know!"，This vessel was the Minorca, which, as we[Pg 235] know, had left Old Harbour shortly after eight o'clock that morning, and now she had shrunk the Mother Country into a delicate vision, and slightly leaning from the wind was sliding with a steady keel through the water which beautified the copper that shone ruddily under her weather-bow with the prisms and crystals and gems of the ocean fountain. In spite of Admiral Lawrence's admiration of her, she would excite laughter in this age as an example of the stump-ended fabrics which the shipwrights of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries were building for sailors. Yet many of these structures made wonderfully long voyages and kept the seas, touching here and there to careen, for as lengthy a period as the average life of the modern steel fabric.，"That is the end—there is no name."，"No," said Billy, with finality.So saying, and evidently not much impressed by meeting an Admiral of whom he had never heard in a schooner that looked uncommonly like a slaver or a pirate, the[Pg 396] lieutenant disappeared, and a moment or two after, the frigate trimmed sail to rejoin the fleet.

He finished his supper in a very gloomy mood. His character has been imperfectly drawn if it leaves upon the reader the impression that he was no more than a gallant, handsome, hectoring scoundrel, a drunkard, a liar, and a gambler. He was more than this, and better than this. In him was a very great deal of honest, sturdy, British human nature, and amongst those who saw the white skin of his character peeping through the rags and tatters of his morals was the young lady whom he had locked up in his cabin. Was he driving, had he driven her mad? This was an awful thought to him, a figure, a presentment on the canvas of his scheme which his utmost imagination never could have painted. He was passionately [Pg 298]fond of her. In truth he was risking his neck to win her. His inmost sensibility as a man and as a gentleman was in perpetual posture of recoil over the reflection that his hand it was that had made this gently-nurtured, beautiful, adorable girl a prisoner in a little ship that was rolling to a port in which she was to be fraudulently sold. He thought of her in the lovely drawing-room of Old Harbour House: the soft illumination of wax lights; the sweet incense of flowers; the piano whose keys were accompanied by her own melodious warblings; her little dog; all the comforts and luxuries which wealth could provide her with; all that a tender-hearted and loving father could endow his only child whom he loved with. And then he thought of her torn from all this pleasantness and sweetness and elegance, so robed that in a short period she must become beggarly to the eye; after her father's hospitable and plentiful table, fed with the poor fare of a common little ship.,"Now," continued Mr Lawrence, still preserving his lofty, superior, rather over-bearing manner, as though he would heave Mr John Eagle overboard by scruff and breech if the fellow durst utter a syllable of offence, "it is arranged by Miss Acton and myself that she should feign that I have kidnapped her—sailed away with her, in short, against her will. This attitude we preconcerted, to rescue her from the accusation of having eloped, which might greatly prejudice her in the eyes of her father, and injure her future and fortune. When, therefore, you meet her, which you doubtless will, she will probably with the utmost passion, nay, even with tears in her eyes, declare that she has been torn from her home by a base artifice. And you'll understand, Mr Eagle, that her sighs, her statements, and her tears are merely tricks and parts of a play which has been carefully prearranged between the lady and myself. Do you understand, sir?" he added, looking stormily at his mean little companion from the altitude of his elegant and commanding figure.,The Aurora's boat was swept alongside the brig, and Captain Acton and the Admiral clambered over the side up a short flight of steps, and in an instant Lucy was clasped in the devouring embrace of her father. Such an old-world scene taxes the highest gifts of the pen or the brush. This Louisa Ann was about fifty years old; she was nearly as broad as she was long. Her fore-mast was stepped far in the bows; her decks were stained and grimy; the paint had faded out of the inside of her bulwarks. Her sails were patched and so dingy that they might have been coloured as a smack's. Her rusty sides were lined with yawning seams amid which three little circular windows were merged with no accentuation from the dirt-shrouded glass which prevented the sea from entering the blistered, worn, mani-coloured hull. Her sailors looked as though[Pg 359] they were shipwrecked: long-haired, bearded, sallow, in clothes considerably tattered, in aspect melancholy and dejected with lack of nourishment, dullness of sailing and ceaseless motion: for here was the tub wallowing like a buoy in a popple upon a smooth sea, and the frightful weather she would make off Cape Horn or in a gale of wind the imagination of a sailor could readily picture by witnessing her motions now.,There's good fish in the sea as has iver been had—,"Help me to turn him over, sir," said Mr Fellowes. "I don't think he is dead.",He ran out of the cabin. The Admiral pillowed his son's head with his arm, and gazed at the marble-still features. Never could any man appear more stricken, though 'tis hard to tell by posture or by expression of face the depth of human sorrow, the pang of the wound that death alone can heal. His only son—whom he had cursed for his wickedness—whose professional life, extinguished by an act of drunken madness, had swelled the eyes of the father with the unshed tears of the spirit of[Pg 439] a man—lying dead or dying on his arm—self-slain!,Billy was running up the aisle.,"Oh, we should be in very good hands—very good hands," answered Captain Acton, lightly regarding him; they had met by appointment not long before at Acton's offices, and there the gallant Captain had taken notice that Mr Lawrence was as sober as he himself was, whilst the care with which he had attired himself had promoted all that was excellent in his person to such a degree that Captain Acton had never thought him handsomer and on the whole a finer specimen of the young British Naval officer.,Harry chuckled. "Faith, ut's crazy he thought I was I guess," he cried. "'Ould man,' sez he, 'somebody has been playin' a trick on ye. I know no such place as Gibson's Grove.' Thin begobs! he laughed, like he saw the humor av ut, and had me sate meself in the shade and smoke a cigar while I risted. So I'm thinkin', byes, them min jest wanted to get rid av me the while they ransacked me house and belongin's, bad cess to 'em!","As a gentleman!" said Captain Acton, who followed his daughter's words with mingled impatience and wonder.,The voice of Lucy within cried out: "Is anybody there?",Five minutes later the trio were out on the forest path, passing in Indian file towards the haunted grove. The wind had risen and now swept through the great trees with ghostly sound. A black cloud, creeping up out of the west, was wiping out the stars. Throughout the forest the notes of the night-prowlers were strangely hushed. No word was spoken between the treasure-seekers until the elm-bridged creek was reached. Then old Harry paused, with labored breath, his head bent as though listening..