But 'tis in the performance of my duty. Can you inform me whither the smugglers be gone that rode by just now with the soldiers after them?"
"How should I be able to tell you that, sir? Do you take me for a smuggler myself?" asked Joan, demurely.
He did not at once answer. The girl looked even handsomer, so it seemed to him, in the dying light of day than she had done by the light of moon and lantern on the preceding evening. The creamy tints of her skin melted into bright carnation on her cheeks; and he thought, with a flash of amusement, of the strictures of the powdered and painted ladies of Hurst Court upon her rustic complexion. Her dress, too, pleased his taste better than theirs had done. She wore neither hood nor cap, and her abundant brown hair was rolled back from her forehead in a style which was at that period somewhat old-fashioned, but which gave infinitely more dignity to the head than the tightly screwed-up knot of the fashionable ladies. She wore no hoop or next to none, and her full skirt, of some sort of gray homespun, fell in graceful folds around her. A long fine
