'Nurse,' said Miss Lally suddenly—I don't think she had heard what we were saying—'there's two shops in the village.'
'Are there, my dear,' I said; 'and is one the post-office? And what do they sell?'
'Yes, one is the post-office, but they sell other things 'aside stamps,' Miss Lally replied. 'They are both everything shops.'
'But the not the post-office one is much the nicest,' said Master Francis. 'It's kept by old Prideaux—he's an old sailor and——' Here the boy looked round, but there was no one in sight. Still he lowered his voice. 'People do say that after he left off being a proper sailor he was a smuggler. It runs in the family, Mrs. Brent says,' he went on in the old-fashioned way I noticed in all the children. 'His father was a regular smuggler. Brent says she's seen some queer transactions when she was a girl in the kitchen behind the shop.'
'I thought Mrs. Brent was a stranger in these parts by her birth and upbringing,' I said.
'So she is,' said Master Francis, 'but she came here on a visit when she was a girl to her uncle at the High Meadows Farm, and that's how she came first to Treluan. Grandfather was alive then, and papa and Uncle Hulbert were boys. Even then Prideaux was an old man. Uncle Hulbert says he knows lots of queer stories—he does tell them sometimes, but not as if they had happened here, and you have to pretend to think he and his father had nothing to do with them themselves.'
'It was he that told us first about the smugglers' caves, wasn't it?' said Miss Bess. 'Fancy, nurse, some treasures were found in one of the caves, not so very long ago, hid away in a dark corner far in. There was lace and some beautiful fine silk stockings and some bottles of brandy——'
'And a lot of cigars and tobacco, but they had gone all bad, and some of the brandy hadn't any taste in it, though some was quite good. But grandpapa was a dreadfully honest man; he would send all the things up to London, just as they were found, for he said they belonged to the Queen.'
'I wonder if the Queen wored the silk stockings her own self?' said Miss Lally.
'If we found some treasures,' said Miss Bess, 'do you think we'd have to send them to the Queen too? It would be very greedy of her to keep them, when she has such lots and lots of everything.'