Old Francis laughed deprecatingly and was about to answer him when Mistress Eliza, her daughter, a tall girl fair like her mother and buxomly beautiful, with their little maid, Betsey, entered with the supper.
During the meal, Mistress Eliza talked almost incessantly, and her husband filled up the few pauses in her streams of conversation with lurid stories of the smugglers’ cruelty. Once after a more vivid one than usual, Mistress Matilda looked archly at the young soldier.
“If only it could be stopped!” she said, while her mother made some remark about poor little Matty’s childishness.
Thomas Playle looked up from the lump of boiled fish he was eating.
“It shall be stopped, mistress,” he said. “Such flagrant crime is a disgrace to the glorious court of His Gracious Majesty.”
While Francis felt the bundle of letters in his pocket and grinned wickedly to himself.
“You have some men in your pay and arms for them, I suppose, Master Myddleton?” observed Playle a little later on in the evening.
“About five,” said Francis, and then, noting the other’s surprise, he added: “But some twenty more trustworthy men can be called out at a moment’s notice, if you find it necessary.”
Playle could hardly repress a smile of pleasure; life seemed suddenly to have opened up to him. Twenty-five men at his orders, a gang of ferocious smugglers to attack, and a pretty girl to stand by and admire at the proper time. His smile broadened.
His ambitions flew away with him and he sat staring at his plate, his brown eyes twinkling with pleasure, until Mistress Myddleton had to touch him on the shoulder and give him a candle, before he realized that Betsey, the little maid, waited to show him his room.