The city in the sea
Date: 2025-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

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Title: The city in the sea

Author: H. De Vere Stacpoole

Release date: March 13, 2025 [eBook #75608]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: George H. Doran Company, 1925

Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CITY IN THE SEA ***

THE CITY IN THE SEA

By H. DE VERE STACPOOLE

Author of
"THE BLUE LAGOON," "POOLS OF SILENCE," ETC.

Gaze deep-sea horses 'neath the wave
And dolphins in mosaic shown,
Up-glimmer from the courts they pave
Far down, what more?...
The winds, alone
Make answer with the gulls, across
The blue, blue depths of Hyalos.

New York
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1925
BY H. DE VERE STACPOOLE

THE CITY IN THE SEA
—Q—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The Island of Hyalos from a sketch map made on board the Lorna Doone, giving soundings within and without the reefs.

[See larger version]

FOREWORD

In June of last year, 1925, long after this book was finished, the Morning Post published an account of how an Arab fisherman off the Isle of Jerba had discovered a city under the sea, giving intimate details that might have been taken from my little town Hyalos—details vouched for by Count de Prohak and Sir Dennison Ross.

Five months later—November 1925—an American reader of "The City in the Sea," then appearing serially in the States, sent me the following cutting from a Hartford Paper:

"Moscow, October 29.—Discovery of an ancient submerged city near Shikov, a sandy bank on the Caspian Sea, was made Wednesday by Alexis Atayeff, a captain in the Soviet mercantile fleet. Atayeff's ship, bound from Persia to Baku, accidentally changed its usual course, and while soundings were being made he noticed buildings on the sea floor. Atayeff asserts that under the bright sunshine he could distinguish streets and buildings of ancient Asiatic architecture. Archæologists believe the discovery reveals the lost city of Karadasheger, which is believed to have been submerged centuries ago by an earthquake."

I make no complaint at these two old cities, one from the Caspian, the other from the Mediterranean, presenting themselves like this to the public; the desire for the limelight is excusable and understandable in a way, but I think with some propriety they might have delayed their appearance. As matters stand, many readers of the Press might fancy they were first on the stage—this is not so. Hyalos was discovered by me long before these venerable antiquities thought fit to appear at the wings to be brought before the footlights by their producers, Sir Dennison Ross and Captain Atayeff.

CONTENTS

| FOREWORD
I. | A MODERN BUSINESS GIRL
II. | A SMALL YACHTSMAN AND AN OLD DEALER
III. | THE QUESTION
IV. | THE REVELATION
V. | HOW?
VI. | MISS BEAMAN
VII. | POOLE
VIII. | THE PURCHASE OF THE "LORNA DOONE"
IX. | MARTIA
X. | DEEP SEA GEAR
XI. | THE CREW OF BLIND MEN
XII. | MARTIA'S SECRET
XIII. | THE START
XIV. | GENOA
XV. | TOWARDS HYALOS
XVI. | HYALOS
XVII. | THE HOUSES
XVIII. | A TERRIBLE DANGER
XIX. | ONE OF THE DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE
XX. | PLANS
XXI. | THE SHIP
XXII. | THE DUMPING OF THE VICTORY
XXIII. | THE BOAT FROM ÆGINA
XXIV. | A MAN OF WAR
XXV. | GENOA AGAIN
XXVI. | THE CUSTOMS
XXVII. | THE GREAT ATTEMPT
XXVIII. | WEST
XXIX. | VISCONTI
XXX. | CORNERED
XXXI. | BEHRENS
XXXII. | A GREAT ART DEALER
XXXIII. | LONDON
XXXIV. | THE END

The City in the Sea

CHAPTER I

A MODERN BUSINESS GIRL

One dry bright morning in early September, Robert Lestrange left his rooms in Cadogan Street, and, boarding a bus bound for Charing Cross climbed on to the roof.

Robert was good to look at, though as a matter of fact he was not particularly good-looking, but he was young, well dressed, well groomed and clean, innocent-seeming and light-hearted; a person one might fancy most engaging to the eyes of girls and confidence trick men.

At Charing Cross he dropped off the bus and took his way along the south side of the Strand, walking in a leisurely manner and absorbing the details around him.

The Strand is much more than a street. It is the life of many nations, the activities of many men; the past and present all made visible and audible. In the Strand walk Henry Irving and Toole, no less surely than Berry and Godfrey Tearle; Disraeli no less living than Baldwin. It is an extension of the Bund of Nagasaki, and an earthquake in San Francisco tells of itself here an hour after the event.

It has also some of the most delightful shops in the world. The shop, for instance, where the sporting guns and rifles are arranged for view and where the big game and the trees of the jungle show shadowlike behind the express rifles.

Bobby hung before this window, absorbing its atmosphere of sport and adventure; then he went on, crossing the mystic boundary line that divides the West End from Newspaperland, on down Fleet Street and up White Lion Court to the doorway of No. 1, Mortimer Buildings.

This is a bit of old London, and here, as in most bits of old London, Romance sits in gloom and, frankly, dirt: the leases have not fallen in, but the railings seem on the point of doing so, and the hall doorsteps up which Bobby went, and the steps of the stairs leading to the first floor, are hollowed out by the feet of generations.

The offices of Beaman & Hare are situated on the first floor facing the court. The principal had not arrived, but Miss Hare was in and would see Mr. Lestrange if he would wait. He agreed to this reasonable proposition, took his seat in the tiny outer office, which was furnished with the Times, two chairs, a table, and a portrait of Thomas Hardy.

Bobby was a writing man. You never would have guessed it following him down the Strand or now, as he sat nursing his knee, regardless of the literature on the table and waiting to interview Miss Hare. When old Nicholas Lestrange had gone broke over post-war industrials and died, and when the Government had done taxing the estate, his one and only child had found himself an orphan, possessed of the furniture of his room at Bibliol College, Oxford, expensive tastes, and two hundred a year to indulge them on.

He did not grumble. He dropped Oxford, came to London with some good introductions, and plunged into the world of newspaperland.

When you start to learn how to be a chef you have to start to learn how to wash up dishes. In Fleet Street it is the same. The great editor is great partly because he has been through the mill and knows every detail of his business; this Robert Lestrange found out after he had been a month in the Street of Adventure, also the fact that he was never likely to become a great editor. He had not the flair for news or the instinct for news values, and the morning paper that is furiously alive at breakfast time and dead at lunch seemed to him of all forms of the printed word the most ephemeral.

Then he found, all at once and by accident, that he could write stories, that he could invent news much more interesting than the news in the papers, and doings much more intriguing (anyhow, more lasting in interest) than the doings of the people of Shoreditch and Belgravia as chronicled in the Press.

He sent his first short story to a friend who was a magazine editor, and it was accepted. He sent a second, and it was refused. Challoner, the editor, explained that the first one was a story and the second was not, showed him the subtle difference between a tale and a record of events; the fact that his first effort was instinctive and right, and that in the second he had failed in a difficult theme for want of craftsmanship; gave him a little book on the art, and dismissed him.

It was a defeat, and suffering under it he did something quite distinctive. He burned his boats, dismissed his employers in Fleet Street, and sat down to this new business, sending his productions to no editor, but to Beaman & Hare, a literary agency recommended by a friend.

This was his first visit to the office, with which he had been corresponding for some months and with which he had already done fairly satisfactory business.

The place did not impress him; it seemed small and cramped, and he was still recovering from the stairs and the fact that Hare was a Miss. He had always fancied the "M. Hare" who signed the typewritten letters and also the cheques, a man; the text of the letters and the handwriting had never suggested anything else. He wondered vaguely, as he sat nursing his knee and waiting for his interview, whether the man who had recommended him to this firm had been altogether happy in his advice. He was not left long in doubt.

The office-boy returned, and he was shown down a passage into a room where a girl seated before a desk littered with papers rose to receive him. She was pleasingly dressed, her auburn hair was shingled, she wore tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, she was nice-looking—not pretty, nice-looking, in a new way.

And now, as she took off her reading glasses and they talked together, she seemed to lose her sex; it was like talking to a man, only much pleasanter.

"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," said the businesslike Miss Hare, "but I am glad you have come. These are your papers and our correspondence on the desk, and I kept you waiting whilst I got them in order. That last story you sent us has been turned down by three magazines because of the deficiency of feminine interest in it. There's no woman at all in it, as a matter of fact, and that's not a fault—it's a crime—in the eyes of the ordinary magazine editor. Yet it is the best story you have written."

"I'm glad you think that," said Bobby.

"Yes, but I'm not an ordinary magazine editor," said Miss Hare. "It was not the fault of the story that it was turned down, it was the fault of our office. I have been away, and Miss Beaman has been busy and Miss Strudwick, whom I am training, sent it to those magazines, quite unsuitable for it. However, when I came back I sent it to the editor of Hoof and Horn with a strong personal note, and this morning I have a letter from him. He likes it, and will pay ten pounds—a wretched price. You see, the people who are interested in hoofs and horns are not nearly so numerous as the people who are interested in girls."

Bobby assented. This frank confession and open way of doing business came to him as a revelation pleasantly new.

"I'm afraid girls are not my strong point," said he.

"When a woman is reading a story," said Miss Hare, "she is the girl. If there are six girls in the story, she is each one of them; if she is eighty, she is still the heroine. If you make your girls pretty, and not impossible, and make them go through adventures, your women readers will supply all the rest. But there must be adventures, that is to say love interest, for love is the only adventure that counts with women readers. I know it's absurd, but there you are. I am not talking of literature, but of story-writing for profit."

The gunshop in the Strand came before Bobby's eyes, and the visionary jungle beasts that had called to him as a storyteller.

"Only half an hour ago," said he, "a shop-window in the Strand gave me a lot of ideas—open air—half-formed ideas, but I felt as if I had tumbled into a nest of stories—it wasn't a bonnet shop."

"What sort of shop?"

"A gunshop."

"I know it," said Miss Hare. "I've often looked in. At least, I think I know the one you mean."

"Do you mean to say you are interested in guns?"

"Anything that takes one's mind away from London is interesting. I was born in the country and could shoot before I was twelve, but that was in the days before the war swept everything away."

A distant look came into her eyes, passed, and putting on the tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, she turned to the table littered with papers.

"Now here," said she, "is something that I want you to do. I would have written about it had you not called. Do you know anything about Tanagra statuettes?"

"I know the things you mean," said Bobby, "but I don't know much about them."

"Well, the editor of the Paternoster Magazine has a cover design for the January number, and he wants a story written around it. Editors sometimes want this sort of thing done. It's not high-class work, but the Paternoster is important and the story will be 'featured,' of course, as representing the cover design. This is it."

She handed him a picture.

It represented a man's hand, open, and, standing on the palm, a Tanagra figurine about nine inches high, a statuette of a Greek girl carrying a jar on her shoulder.

Lestrange, holding the drawing a little distance away from him, contemplated it with his head slightly on one side, and Miss Hare, in her turn, contemplated him.

He pleased her.

Already, and before she had seen him, she had taken a liking to him. She liked the stories he had sent in and she liked, even better, his business letters addressed to the firm; modest, straightforward, unassuming letters, always to the point: his handwriting had pleased her, and she was a judge of handwriting.

"Of course," said she, "many writers would consider it perhaps infra dig to be asked for a story in this way written round a cover design, but the Paternoster is worth pleasing, and, after all, nobody will know but the editor."

"Oh, I'm not bothering about that," said he. "It's the difficulty. How on earth am I to make a story of this thing—that's the question."

"Johnson said he could write a story about a broomstick if called upon," said Miss Hare.

"Yes, but this isn't a broomstick. I know something about broomsticks, but this——Well, I'll try. I must hunt round and find out things about Tanagra statuettes. The British Museum might help me, or the South Kensington."

"Try Behrens, in Museum Street," said she. "He's sure to know, and he's a dear old man, and you'll get atmosphere there, if you get nothing else. Number Six A Museum Street is his address, and you can mention my name. He's one of my best friends."

She paused, and into her eyes came that far-away look again, as though she were gazing over the past.

"Shall I take the drawing with me?" asked he, rising to go.

"No," said the girl, "I'll send it to your address by registered post. It's the only copy, and you might leave it in a cab or something. I'm sure you are forgetful."

"Now, how on earth did she know that?" said Bobby as he came down the stairs.

CHAPTER II

A SMALL YACHTSMAN AND AN OLD DEALER

Coming down the stairs he was quite a different person from the man who had gone up only half an hour before.

Only women and wine are able to work magic like that.

He felt warmed and cheered, and his work seemed worth doing. A little appreciation goes a long way with a writer, and though Martia Hare had said little enough in the way of appreciation, what she had said was genuine. But though the appreciation had cheered, it was the woman who had warmed.

For the last three months he had been leading a pretty lonely life. When he had dropped Fleet Street he had lost touch with a great number of people, women and men, fellow-workers and fellow human beings; the smash his father had come in the financial world had made him chary of approaching the people he had known in better days, and as a result he had been living in an isolation excellent for work but bad for the worker.

If you want to find loneliness do not go to the Sahara desert. Go to London, with its population of seven million people crowded within a radius of a few miles. Here you will find the real thing as Bobby had found it, and here you will appreciate at its full value the interest of a fellow man or woman.

Out in the desolation of roaring Fleet Street he found that he was not alone. The pleasant image of the girl of the literary agency was with him. She had not only attached herself to his work, but also in some way to himself. It was not a question of love at first sight, or of love at all, but of something more subtle; even, perhaps, more mysterious—liking.

It was fifteen minutes to one, and reckoning that it was useless to call on Behrens till later in the afternoon, Bobby hailed a taxi, got in, and told the driver to take him to the Café Chianti in Old Compton Street.

Here when he had paid and dismissed the driver, he found that he had left his walking-stick in the cab, a fact that, so far from annoying him, made him chuckle. How did Miss Hare know his bias in this respect? And what an amazingly fortunate thing it was that he had not left the picture behind in the cab instead of a half-crown walking-stick. The picture that carried with it the good-will of the editor of the Paternoster Magazine.

She had saved him from the effects of his own forgetfulness, and it was as though another little bond had been tied between them.

The angel who looks after lonely young men was busy that day with the affairs of Bobby, for, as he took his seat at a table to the right of the doorway and picked up the menu, a man at the next table on the left leaned across and touched him on the arm.

It was Hackett, unseen for several years. Samuel Hackett, otherwise known as Sam, who had been sent down from St. John's for screwing a tutor so firmly up in his rooms that a carpenter had to be called in.

Sam looked just the same, rather disreputable—no tailor could ever dress him—just the same, but for an attempt at a beard and the deep bronze of an out-of-door man.

"I've got a boat," said he, after greetings had been exchanged and in answer to inquiries as to his doings. "I used to keep her up the Hamble, but I've shifted to Poole Harbour. Do you know Poole Harbour?"

"No I don't," said Bobby; "only that it is near Bournemouth. But what are you doing with the boat?"

"Living in her," said Sam. "It's the only life. No rates and taxes, only harbour dues; no servants, only one man; fishing as much as you want, and the whole Channel to cruise in."

"You're not married?"

"No," said Sam. "You don't want to be married if you have a boat. She wants all your attention, and women are a nuisance, anyway, at least on board a boat."

"Well, I'm jolly glad to see you," said Bobby. "What are you doing to-night? Let's have some dinner somewhere and go to a theatre afterwards."

"No," said Hackett. "I only came up to get some gadgets and a spare suit of oilskins in the East India Dock Road. I'm going back by the five train; but I'll always be glad to see you at Poole. Anyone will show you my boat—she's the Sandfly—everyone knows me at Poole."

A feeling had come to Bobby that the joyous Sammy of other days must have encountered strange influences to make him like this, so indifferent to pleasure, so different from his old self. He did not know the type yet, or the fact that he was talking to an almost perfect specimen of the full-blown small yachtsman; a being for whom towns existed only as suppliers of mast-winches and oilskin suits, and in whose eyes God made the ocean as a practice ground for five to forty tonners.

They parted outside the café, Hackett making east for the delights of the Dock Road and Bobby north for Museum Street and the shop of Behrens.

Museum Street is the conduit that leads from Oxford Street and to-day to where antiquity sits sheltered by the roof of the Museum and amidst the well-preserved ruins of the world she once knew as young.

Miss Hare was right. Museums are destructive to inspiration, and hunting for mushrooms in Labrador would be a fruitful occupation compared to hunting for a living story amidst the marbles.

But Museum Street is a different matter, and Behrens' shop, which stands half-way down on the right hand side, is another matter still.

I have never seen anyone pass Behrens' without stopping to look in. By "anyone" I mean of course strangers to the street and people not in too great a hurry.

Behrens is the man who beat Wangenheim at the great Sale of Japanese Surinomo held in London in 1912, securing the whole of a Baron Kamekura's collection for the British Museum.

Surinomo are Japanese Christmas cards, the newest craze among collectors, and invaluable, some of them, especially when signed by Hokuga, whose signature looks like a corkscrew, or Korinsai, whose device suggests three five-barred gates and a gridiron. It was Behrens who outbid the Americans for the Hispano Mauro lustre-ware at the Huth sale, a collection which beats even that at Warwick Castle; and it was he who declared the wax bust of the hunting Diana, attributed to Benvenuto Cellini by a certain great critic of art, to be an impudent fake.

But in the windows of his shop there is little to indicate these activities of mind and purse; a chair of Beauvais tapestry, an arquebus inlaid with silver, a set of crystal vases, always something attractive without ostentation, and appealing to the sense of form or colour.

Bobby pressed the latch and entered the shop of Behrens, releasing as he did so a bell that rang wildly in the back premises and fell dumb when the door closed on the street.

Then he stood in the silence, looking around him and waiting for someone to come.

The centre of the shop was taken up with a show-case, flat like a table and filled with all sorts of small coloured and glittering things from the antique world. It was as though a magic net had been cast in time, a net sweeping the shores of the Roman and mediæval worlds and the world of later days, a net made only for the catching of gems and bibelots and bringing up everything from a snuffbox of Pettio's to a chaplet by Benvenuto Cellini.

On either side and lining the shop walls, tall glass show-cases exhibited armour and swords, crystal cups and goblets, German chest-locks, carvings of John Voyez, and, occupying two large cabinets, reposed a wonderful collection of Japanese masks, almost life-sized faces in ivory, carved to represent Diakoku the god of Wealth, the Rice god, the god of Roads, and twenty others, to say nothing of mousmés and mouskos, old women and comic actors.

Bobby was looking at these things, when from the back of the shop and past a tapestried screen came Behrens.

Behrens looked exactly as a man ought to look who is seventy-five, and who has spent sixty years of his life face to face with antiques in the stuffy atmosphere of cities, and surrounded always by either the silence of the show-room or the noise of the market.

He wore glasses with tortoiseshell rims, after the modern fashion, and a grey beard and moustache that hid the expression of his lower face.

An old fellow with a grey beard and spectacles; quite commonplace to anyone but a connoisseur of men, who would have at once noticed his hands; delicate, extraordinary sensitive-looking hands, that seemed never quite at rest, but always questing to touch, to weigh and to feel.

"I believe I have the pleasure of speaking to Mr. Behrens?" said Bobby. "Miss Hare, of the firm of Beaman & Hare, asked me to call. At least, she suggested that I should call—she said you knew her."

"I know her well," said Behrens. "And what can I do for you, Mr.——"

"Lestrange. My name is Lestrange."

"Any relationship to Mr. Nicholas Lestrange?"

"He was my father."

"Think of that now," said Behrens. "I have had many dealings with your father, Mr. Lestrange, and now that I come to look at you closely I seem to see a likeness. I always found him an easy customer to deal with and I think he always found me an honest dealer, two things that rarely come together in this world, Mr. Lestrange."

"I suppose you know that my father is dead?"

"Yes, I know that," said Behrens. He did not add that he had attended the sale at Bramshott in Kent and bought half the pictures and all the china, over which he had made a considerable profit.

Behrens, though a man with a heart, believed in the motto of Balzac: "There is no friendship in business," and though he had felt an affection for the good-hearted Nicholas Lestrange, he had had no qualms at all about profiting from his estate.

"My father was ruined," said Bobby. "He was speculating in things and they went the wrong way. So I've just had to set to to earn my living."

Behrens, half sitting on a great Elizabethan chest covered with red leather, took a cigarette case from his pocket, and offered it while he examined the young man before him with the terrible eye that could tell worth from dross in men no less than in antiques.

"And how are you setting about that, if I may ask?" inquired he.

The question covered Bobby with confusion. It was perhaps the matter-of-fact and businesslike air of the art dealer that made story-writing for a living seem, suddenly, an occupation of the feminine gender, an employment on the embroidery side of things, good enough for girls but not good enough for a young man beginning life.

"I started with newspaper work," said he, "and then I turned from that to writing."

"And what do you write?" asked Behrens.

"Stories."

"Ah, stories. And do you manage to sell these stories that you write?"

"Yes, some."

"And they are published?"

"I believe so," said Bobby, laughing. "I believe there are publishers crazy enough to publish my work and pay for it."

"There are no crazy business men in London," said Behrens. "Take my word for it as a trader. If publishers take your work and pay for it, you may be sure that it is worth what they pay, twice over. That is not flattery, it is an axiom. Why are you ashamed of your work?"

"I'm not," said Bobby, brought to a halt in his mind by this alarming old man who seemed to see his thoughts. "Only sometimes it seems to me that storytelling is too easy to be called work—isn't exactly the work for a man."

"How old are you?" asked Behrens.

Bobby told, and the art dealer was silent for a moment. Then he spoke.

"What work is easy that is difficult? And is a man any the less a man because his work has pleasure for its objective and not utility or destruction? All the same, I see what you mean. But if you go about the world collecting material for your stories, you will find the business, I think, eminently the work for a man."

"How do you mean collecting material?"

"How do I mean? Well now, look here. How can any man who paints pictures or writes stories or poems convey to his audience the effects of hate, of love, of passion, of dread, of fear, on the human mind if he has not experienced those emotions? How can he show you Spain if he has never seen Spain, or a storm at sea if he has never known the sea except at Margate? You think you are talking to an art dealer, Mr. Lestrange. You are not. You are talking to Jacob Behrens, who has always been a dealer in Life, and who owes all the money he has in the bank to his recognition that a real work of art is a living thing, and that the study of man is as important to the success of an art dealer as the study of textures and surfaces and forms. Also," added Behrens, with a chuckle, "to the fact that he is an adventurer at heart.

"Do you want my advice? Well, then, throw down your pen for a while and go and have adventures: see the world in all its various forms, get robbed, get heart-broken by women, get anything you like, but get experience, before you get rheumatism, like me, and wealth and possessions, which are worse than rheumatism as far as the adventurous spirit of a man is concerned."

"I'd like nothing better," said Bobby; "only knocking round the world takes money."

"Then knock around the world and make money," said Behrens, with another of his little chuckles.

"How?"

"Well, that depends. You are talking to Jacob Behrens, who never wastes time and who knows that the surest way of wasting time is to spend it in giving advice to young men."

"Well, seems to me you have been doing it."

"No, I have just been preparing the ground for a suggestion. When I had been speaking to you only a few minutes and found you were the son of your father and read your face, I said to myself, 'Here is the man you want. Here is a young man strong and healthy and to be trusted. The only question is, has he the spirit for a big adventure?' That I have not yet found out."

Bobby said nothing. Things were taking a strange turn—unless, indeed, Behrens was a little bit touched in the head, which he did not seem to be.

"It's sudden," said the old man, "my talking like this and asking a question like that, seeing I've only known you ten minutes. But my name is Jacob Behrens, and if I hadn't been sudden all my life, I wouldn't have the money I have in the bank to-day. I can't abide slow thinking or dilatory acting, and I'm going to ask you a snap question. Would you on the chance of making anything from five to twenty thousand pounds take a risk, pack a bag, and go where I tell you?"

"Depends on what you call the risk," said Bobby.

"That's a fair answer," replied Behrens, "and shows your head is screwed on right. Well, now, I've no more time to waste to-day, but if you will call upon me to-morrow evening at nine o'clock and have a cigar and a cup of coffee, I'll tell you what is in my mind, unless I have concluded the business with someone else—which is possible, but not probable."

"I'll come," said Bobby.

Mad or not, Behrens pleased him. Like the guns in the shop window, the old gentleman had induced in his mind the atmosphere of adventure. One could not fancy Behrens chasing as much as a rabbit, and yet the effect of his talk was almost as though some bold buccaneer had clapped the young man on the shoulder.

"If I have no business to offer you," said Behrens, "you shall at least have a good cigar and we will talk of art and these things." He waved his hand at the treasures around whilst he began to walk Bobby to the door. "These pretty trifles from the courts of France and the old courts of Italy, and these pieces of armour from a greater age than ours."

He opened the door, and Bobby was about to say good-day when he remembered something that he had forgotten, something even more important than the walking-stick he had forgotten in the cab.

"That reminds me," said he. "The reason I came to you to-day was to find out all about Tanagra statuettes. I had to write a story about them. It's stupid of me, for now I have taken up so much of your time I don't like to bother you on the subject."

"You are talking of the figurines found in the olive groves of Tanagra and dating from the fourth and fifth century before Christ. Well, it is an interesting subject, and to-morrow night, if we have no better business to discuss, we will talk about them."

Saying this, Behrens bowed his visitor into Museum Street and closed the door.

In the street, and released from the spell of the old gentleman and his shop, Bobby felt for a moment cheap. He had failed in the business he had set out upon, and, instead of gathering the information he desired, had allowed himself to be hypnotised by an interesting personality, wound up in a bobbin of talk, and dismissed like a child.

This unbusinesslike habit of forgetting things had gone against him in the newspaper world and was pursuing him in Storyland. He felt depressed, but the depression did not last long. The spell of Behrens returned on him, and, as he walked towards the Museum, failure was forgotten in the interest of the question: "What on earth can he want to see me about to-morrow night?"

CHAPTER III

THE QUESTION

When he got home that evening with a whole sheaf of information on the subject of figurines which he had culled from the courteous authorities of the Museum, he found that the post had brought him the cover design for the Paternoster Magazine.

Martia Hare had not forgotten her end of the business, and her thoughtfulness contrasted with his own carelessness made him sit down to work with a determination to succeed. He lit a pipe, went over his notes, closed his eyes and waited for inspiration to come. Nothing came but Behrens asking him the question: "Would you, on the chance of making anything from five to twenty thousand pounds, take a risk, pack a bag, and go where I tell you?"

The question would not let him work, and as he sat, the tobacco livening his imagination, the whole proposition took on a new form, new colours and a reality which gave him pause.

Behrens had been in earnest. What did he mean by a risk? Was he proposing a shady deal? No, Behrens did not seem that sort of person. He was a respectable man in a large way of business, and even if he had been a crook, would any crook in the world propose such a thing to an absolute stranger after only ten minutes' conversation.

Then what was the meaning of it all?

He went to bed asking himself the question. The business had seized upon his imagination.

It pursued him in dreamland and next day, when he sat down to work, it stood at the gates of his mind, chasing all other ideas away.

At three o'clock, after a blank day and feeling as though the art of story-writing had forever gone from him, he left his rooms, took a bus and got off in Fleet Street. A few minutes later he was in White Lion Court.

Yes, Miss Hare would see him. He was shown into her room.

"I've come to bother you again," said Bobby, taking the chair she pointed out to him. "You must think me an awful worry, but it's not business I've come about—at least, not the story business—it's old Behrens."

"Yes?"

"I called on him and we had a long talk; it seems he knew my father in a business way and he got quite chummy, asked what I was doing, and when I told him, he said I ought to chuck the story-writing for a while and go about the world and get experience."

The girl, seated sideways at the desk-table, took off her reading glasses and, placing them on the papers at her elbow, turned more fully towards Lestrange; she was tired after a long day's work, and still with work to be completed before leaving the office, yet she showed no sign of impatience.

"I told him," went on Bobby, "that I hadn't money enough to travel. I've only two hundred a year of my own, you know, and he told me to go and travel and make it. However, what I've come about is just this: after we'd been talking a while, he sprung a proposition on me that was pretty staggering, and I've come to ask your opinion on what I should do. Sure I'm not taking up your time with all this?"

"No, no. Go on."

"Well, he asked me would I be willing to go into a venture that might bring me in a lot of money? He hinted that it might be risky and he asked me to call to-night at nine o'clock and talk the matter over."

"And you said——?"

"I said I'd call, but the whole thing is so extraordinary I had to come and tell you about it and ask your advice."

"Why my advice?"

"Because you are cleverer than I am," said Bobby, "and you know him. I'm perfectly sure he is straight, but still I just thought I'd come and ask you what you thought."

"As a matter of fact," said the girl, "I had a telephone message this morning from him asking about you."

Bobby laughed.

"Asking what I knew about you and saying that he had some business he might be able to put in your way. He wanted to know if I thought you were to be trusted and I said certainly you were."

He laughed again.

"But how do you know that I am to be trusted?"

"I don't know it," replied she, "I feel it."

She looked straight in his eyes and it seemed to Bobby in that moment as though a link had been welded binding him to the girl in a friendship that would never be broken.

"You came," she went on, "to ask me was he to be trusted, and I can answer you: yes, certainly. Also I believe I know the business he is thinking of asking you to engage in. There is nothing wrong in it, but it is extraordinarily—fascinating. I can't say more. It's his secret, but I can say this——"

"Yes?"

"I believe I know why he thought of you in connection with the matter. He had a son of about your age who was killed just at the end of the war, and who would have carried this project through for him had he lived. I may be wrong, but I fancy—well, no matter."

She turned. One of the typewriting girls had come in, carrying a little tray with two cups of tea.

Bobby accepted a cup and a cigarette.

"Well, that's settled," said he, when they were alone again. "I'll call on him this evening. There seems to me a lot in this business, and who knows what may come of it. But the thing that's on my mind now is that Tanagra statuette story. I feel that I will never be able to do it. That worries me."

"Don't worry about that," said Martia. "If the thing does not appeal to you, turn it down. I will try it with someone else."

"It's not the story that worries me," said he, "but the fact that you took such trouble over it, and that I have wasted your time—and there's more than that, you took an interest in my doing it—and I'd do anything on earth to do anything you wanted me to do. I'm bad at explaining things—but there are so few people in this world that really care a button for one—I mean for one's work—that—well, there it is."

He was frightfully tied up all at once. His tongue had got away with him and he felt that somehow he had made a fool of himself.

But the girl understood.

"You will come and tell me all about it," said she, as he rose to take his departure. "I shall be more than interested to know what happens between you two."

"Yes, I'll come," said Bobby.

Out in the street he walked, not knowing or caring whither he went. He wanted exercise, and to walk off the new flood of energy that had suddenly filled his being. He wanted also to think. He felt like a canoeman who has floated from a big stream into a broad and swiftly flowing river; the river of Adventure, whose very breath is life. He felt no longer alone; it was as though with him in the canoe was seated the girl who had brought him into this business, the girl with the auburn hair and green-grey eyes, expressive eyes, that darkened and lightened to the sun or shadow of her thoughts.

And yesterday morning he did not even know of her existence—only of her name.

CHAPTER IV

THE REVELATION

At five minutes to nine o'clock, Bobby turned into Museum Street.

Looking at his watch and finding himself five minutes too early, he walked up and down the street opposite Behrens' shop. He was just about to cross when the side door opened, and a tall, black-bearded man came out, followed to the door-step by Behrens himself.

"Well, good-night, Visconti," said Behrens.

Bobby crossed over, and Behrens, who was just going in again, held the door open for him to enter.

"You are to the moment," said the old fellow. "A minute earlier and you would have been too early, and a minute later I would have had to come down to open for you. My servant is out. Come up."

He closed the door and led the way upstairs to a sitting-room on the first floor.

An astonishing place, considering that it was Behrens', for here was nothing that hinted of antiquity. Big saddle-bag easy chairs, an Axminster carpet, pictures of the modern French school on the walls, a centre table with an open tantalus case, a soda syphon and a big tin of cigarettes, a side table with a coffee apparatus and cups. An astonishing place.

"Sit down," said Behrens. "Put your hat on the table, make yourself comfortable. You will have coffee? That is right. I will make you the coffee. It is Bourbon coffee; fools drink Mocha. Take a cigarette. And how do you like my apartment? Bourgeois, isn't it? Well, trust me, the bourgeois knows. Stattenheimer of Bond Street—and I beat him last week at the Clement sale, as you might have seen in the papers, only young men don't read the art news in the papers—Well, Stattenheimer, he lives in Chelsea, in a Jacobean house, where there is no chair you can sit on with comfort, no pictures; he said my apartment was bourgeois. 'Very well,' said I, 'I am an old bourgeois who takes an interest in art as a business and a science, that is all I am. My shop is my art gallery, and I keep my eye fresh by looking at modern things in my home. I don't sit on my antiques, I sell them.' Here's your coffee."

He handed the cup and took his seat in an arm-chair opposite to his guest, took off his glasses, wiped them with a silk handkerchief, and then lit a cigar.

Bobby noticed that everything this old gentleman did, even to the wiping of his glasses, was done with care and particularity, and apparently to the exclusion from his mind of all other matters whatsoever. The cigar-lighting took him a full half-minute. When it was accomplished he leaned back in his chair and started to talk.

"Did you see that man I was letting out? Well, he's my agent in Italy. He's going back to Rome to-morrow. He's a pig-headed fellow. Only for that he might have taken up this business I am going to tell you about to-night, but he refused it. I went to the trouble of going into the whole of the plans with him, and he had the impudence to tell me that it would be a waste of time, that there was nothing in it. Told that to me, Jacob Behrens, who knew all about time and how not to waste it before he was born. I did not press the matter with him to-night. I had you in mind. You are younger than he is, for one thing. Also you are an Englishman, and all Englishmen love the sea."

"Oh, it's a sea job?" said Bobby.

"Yes, it's a sea job," said the old man with a little chuckle. "Very much so. A contest with Poseidon which I wish to engage you in. I do not ask if you are a sailor or used to ship matters. If we come to terms, we will engage the crew you will require for this matter. What I do want is a man I can trust, a young man full of life, and an Englishman. What made me ever think of an Italian for this business I don't know."

"Well, I believe you can trust me," said Bobby. "But why do you want an Englishman, especially?"

"Go and ask the gods who made the Great War," said the other. "It is the British who do things, even impossible things. Well, I didn't ask you to call to-night to talk of the British, but of our friend Poseidon and the little matter between myself and him. My son was a naval officer. I'm a naturalised Jew, and Isaac, my son, was swept into the net of the Great War. He was in the submarine service, employed in the Mediterranean, and out there, almost as the last gun was fired, he died of enteric fever. You can't imagine what that meant to me; you are too young to imagine the grief of a father for the loss of his only son, and may you never know it. But there it is: he died.

"Six months before his death he sent me a most interesting communication and a plan, which we would have worked out together had he lived.

"Do you know the Greek Islands?"

Behrens rose and went to a bureau near the door, from which he produced a map.

"Here they are, right from 40 degrees to 36 degrees, from Giura to Christiana. Look at them and the way they are spread like a net across the mouth of the Ægean and the road to Constantinople. You can fancy how useful they were in the war as lurking places for submarines. Isaac's boat used to hunt round from Milo to Andros and the mouth of the channel between Negroport and the mainland. Now look here, look at this small island Polykandros, and this dot south of Polykandros which is not named on the map, but the name of which is Hyalos. Well, some time before he died Isaac's boat was ordered south to lie in wait for an enemy ship, and it anchored in a quiet little bay on the north of Hyalos.

"Hyalos is a high island, uninhabited, and consisting mainly of rock. A man was sent ashore to keep watch, and one day, having nothing better to do, Isaac and a couple of his fellow-officers put off in a small boat to fish in the bay.

"Here, under water on the eastern side of this bay, they came upon the ninth wonder of the world—a little Greek town."

Behrens paused to relight the cigar which had gone out.

"I beg your pardon?" said Bobby.

"Town. A little town submerged at a depth of only some five fathoms; a thing as old as history, yet perfect in its way, preserved in the lap of the tideless sea and by the reefs that break the storms and high waves to the north of Hyalos. The reefs have not only protected the town from the sea and its storms, they have also protected it from visitation. No ships ever go near Hyalos, not even the fishing vessels of Nios and Thera. But the British Navy goes everywhere, especially in war time, and British naval officers are born sportsmen. There were three other men in the boat with Isaac. It was he who, looking over, saw first the wonderful thing in the water below—houses, some in partial decay, some entire; streets, public buildings; an agora—all quiet down in the glittering water, and flown over by fish instead of birds.

"Do you know anything of the structure of old Greek cities and houses? I am not talking about Pompeii, which was Græco-Roman, but of the true Greek city centuries before Pompeii was destroyed. Well, the house of the old Greek was simply a courtyard open to the sky, surrounded by a covered colonnade off which opened rooms. That is roughly what it was. The courtyard, open to the sky, and the colonnade were the main things; the rooms might be more or less in number, they were generally small.

"The floor of the courtyard was as a rule done in mosaic work, and in the centre stood an altar to the Zeus of the home, and in front of the house before the door of entrance stood as a rule a statue of Hermes or a cone-shaped pillar indicating Apollo.

"When Isaac looked over first, the boat was floating above a house, the walls and colonnade of which were intact, and the mosaic-paved courtyard glimmered up at him, showing its pattern of dolphins and sea-horses.

"You can fancy his astonishment! Sea-horses prancing beneath the sea and done in mosaic; dolphins in blue and red, all brilliant in colour despite the ages that had passed since man's foot had trodden them.

"He held his breath in his surprise whilst the boat drifted across a street where ruts were still visible, left by the wheels of vehicles vanished before Christ was born. What I am telling you is the truth. Just as Mariette entered the tomb of the Apis saw on the sand the foot mark a man had left three thousand years before, Isaac saw the wheel-marks of the traffic that once had been in this street given over to silence and the sea.

"He saw also a Hermes that had fallen down before a house, and then, calling to his companions, he bade them look.

"Now these men with him were British sailors, men of the highest type of manhood, and what they saw when they looked over the side of the boat interested them, yet left them cold. A big living fish would have appealed to them more than this little dead city where people had loved and lived and traded before Christ was born or the Roman Empire—for, mark you this, Hyalos is no Græco-Roman town, but a town submerged in the flower-time of Greek art.

"Isaac who had the artistic sense and knowledge denied to his companions, and who, moreover, was my son, knew at once the extraordinary nature of the find. Knew that they had not only discovered a dead city, but a very treasure-house of ancient art. The indifference of the others so vexed him that he said nothing of this. He sealed the matter in his heart. Isaac was the son of an art collector, who is also a tradesman. I am quite frank. During the week that his ship stayed in the bay he brooded over the matter, questioning his heart as to whether, when the war was over, he would return with my help, secretly, and recover from this place all he could by diving operations, or whether he would tell the Greek Government and make the matter public. He decided on the first course. Hyalos belonged to no Government. It belonged only to the sea and to antiquity, and its art treasures to the bold diver who first laid hands upon them.

"Without doubt many a Greek fisherman had looked down through the ages and seen what Isaac saw, but without caring or knowing or understanding, not guessing that here lay a treasure worth all the fishing fleets of the islands. Without doubt through the future years the place would be equally neglected, for no one comes to Hyalos, which is only a rock surrounded by reefs.

"Yes, he felt quite easy in his mind on the question of secretly looting this place, and during the week of his stay laughed at by his companions as an antiquarian, he would put out every day in the smallest boat of the destroyer, and spend hours exploring and mapping this town where nothing moved but the fish and their shadows. This is the map he made."

Behrens rose and took from the bureau a large sheet of paper, a map carefully made, and showing the minute and complicated city in its entirety. The agora, the streets, a tiny theatre, houses, some half-ruined, some entire, complete just as when some subsidence slow or sudden had brought the waters of the sea above the market-place, the streets, the house tops. Bobby brooded over this thing, fascinated by the story of Behrens.

"When the destroyer left Hyalos," went on the old man, "she was ordered north, and was mined off Eubœa, by a floating mine from the Dardanelles. No one was saved but Isaac and an old quarter-master. Isaac died later, as I told you, of enteric fever. But he had sent me home all I have told you and this map. Had Isaac lived he and I would have gone together to this place, taken divers with us, and reaped the harvest of the centuries and the sea; but I am too old now; his death aged me ten years in ten minutes, and I have lost the appetite for adventure, unless it is the adventure of the sale rooms. Yet I want to secure from this place some part at least of the treasure it holds, not from greed, for I am worth most of a million, but for three reasons. One is sentiment. Isaac had his heart set on this business, it was his desire that I should profit by it. Another reason is that it would grieve me to the heart should Gundermann, or François Boucy, or any of the big men in the world of antiquities get hold of this business by any chance. Another is the desire for acquisition which is part of my nature. I am frank with you. I spoke of a risk. There is a risk of the sea and there is a risk that, should the Greek Government find you removing things from this place, of which they do not know the existence, there might be trouble. I cannot tell you the law on the subject; the case is quite unique, but I can at least say that should there be trouble, I will stand by you—should you care to take the matter up and work it for me. I will give you half the worth of the things recovered, and that may be a very large sum of money. I would, of course, pay for the expedition."

Bobby was silent for a moment, looking at the map on his knee. The thing fascinated him, but he was the son of Nicholas Lestrange, a business man with a level head, despite his losses in post-war industries. Then he said:

"There's nothing I'd like better, but I can't say right off. I'd like twenty-four hours to think of it."

"That is only fair," said Behrens. "I do not wish to rush you into a business that has its dangers. One question you will be asking yourself—is it honest? Well, I think you can be sure on that point. I care nothing for what the Greeks might say about the law. Morally, I am sure that whoever comes first on these treasures, that belong to nobody by right, since the owners had vanished before Rome was an Empire, morally I say, I am sure that the first finder of them is entitled to keep them. Besides," finished the old fellow grimly, "I am no friend of the Greeks either in the sale room or the world of politics—but that is another question."

"Oh, I'm not bothering about the morals of it," said the other. "The stuff's there, whatever it is, to be dredged up by anyone, it seems to me, and I'm ready to run the risk of the Greeks jumping on us. It's only I want to think things over. I've done some sea work down in Devonshire, and can handle a boat. It's only just I want to think things over. It's a big proposition. Are you sure the treasures, whatever they are, will be all right and worth anything after being in the sea all these years?"

"In 1901," said Behrens, "the sponge-fishers off Cape Malea found an old ship on the sea-floor laden with Greek bronzes and statuary. It was a ship of the fleet of Sulla, and had been lying there for two-thousand years. The bronzes and statuary were perfect. In 1905, or thereabouts, divers brought up from the Lake of Nemi bronze beam-heads and ornaments from the ship of Calligula. They were perfect, yet Calligula died on January 24th, forty-one years after the birth of Christ. No, Mr. Lestrange, you need not fear that the treasures of Hyalos are not worth taking. The only thing you need trouble about is the expedition. Should you take this matter up, I will do the paying; you will have to do the leading. You will have to get the proper men together and a small ship, an outfit for diving, and so forth. The men must be selected: men who will not talk, and men who will be content with a salary, not a share in the business. Have you any idea how to set about all this?"

"Not the slightest," said Bobby.

"Good—you at least know where you stand, and will be open to suggestions."

"I haven't the slightest idea how the thing is to be done," said Bobby; "but I'm perfectly sure if I tackle it I'll do it. With your help, of course."

"Good. And you will have this great assistance—the treasure you are after is neither gold nor silver; the things you go to seek will not rouse the demon of cupidity in the breast of any ordinary Englishman of the seafaring type. They are indeed useless to any man except a person like myself, who is able to dispose of them. And there are only four persons like myself in Europe, that is to say men who have the American market in their hands, and who are known and trusted by the great American connoisseurs—not that I am likely to dispose of the treasures in my lifetime. I buy these valuables not yet recovered from the sea, and it is I who will pay you half their worth. A good bargain for me, Mr. Lestrange, and I venture to say a good bargain for you. They may be worth five, ten, twenty thousand pounds or half a million, it is all the same. You shall receive your half, and the valuer shall be Jacob Behrens, who though working for his own hand, will be just with you."

"That I am certain of," said Bobby. A new flame was burning in his breast, not lit by cupidity, but by the challenge in this affair. He would have to get this expedition together and lead it, choose his men, get the vessel and equipment, and bring the thing to a triumphant conclusion. The difficulties were not the least attractive part of the affair, and Behrens would back him financially.

He sat for a moment brooding. Then he looked up.

"I'll do it," he said. "I asked for twenty-four hours to think it over. I don't want them. If you are willing, I'll clinch the matter now."

"Think twice," said Behrens. "I would not have you go into this matter without full consideration. There are the risks of the sea and the risk of trouble with Governments, not only the Greek, but the British Government. Nothing, I am sure, would please the British Government more than to spoil a little deal like this, quite forgetting that Britain herself stole the Elgin marbles, not from under the sea, but from their only true setting, the Acropolis of Athens. So if you obtain these things and bring them in safety to the English coast, you will still have the difficulty of landing them unknown to the Custom House. There is no duty on objects of art, but, all the same, questions would be asked."

"I know," said Bobby. "I can see the whole clearly. All the same I'll take the business on."

"I bind you to nothing," said Behrens, "and if to-morrow or next day you should wish to withdraw, you are at liberty. Having said that, I would like also to say that I think you have chosen rightly. Any Government risk would only amount to a fine and confiscation; the fine would fall on me. The sea risks are only what any young man ought to be prepared to face.

"Now, as to the money side of the business. I am prepared to allocate a sum of three thousand pounds to be used for ship hire and so forth, all accounts to be presented to me for payment. I believe that amount will cover the business. I will deduct it from the amount at which I value any treasure found before dividing that amount with you. Have you need of ready money?"

"No," said Bobby. "I have about fifty pounds loose in the bank—enough to carry on with."

"Well," said Behrens, "any money you may spend in this business make a note of, and I will refund it. You understand the position? There are three thousand pounds for you to use. I am not going to tie your arms. I trust you to spend nothing foolishly. I give you carte blanche so that you may make your dispositions, hire your men, hire your ship, get your diving apparatus and so forth. You say you have been used to fishing on the Devonshire coast. I would advise you to go there for your men and your vessel. They are honest men down there."

"Thanks," said Bobby. "It's nice to be trusted like that, and I shan't waste your money. Yes, I might try Devonshire. Anyhow, I'll think the whole thing over and get to work as quickly as possible. I'll keep you informed of what I am doing."

Half an hour later he was in the street.

It was twenty minutes past eleven. In two hours and twenty minutes the course of his life had been changed; he had been turned from a humdrum existence to face Adventure and the deep sea, with a chance of making a fortune at a single coup, and with a credit of three thousand pounds to back him.

CHAPTER V

HOW?

Bobby got a bus from Oxford Circus to Charing Cross. It was after twelve when he reached Cadogan Street and turning on the electric light in his sitting-room, sat down to smoke, to think, and to plan.

It seemed to him that he had never come against the real things of life till now. Up to this he had followed the grooves worn and polished by other men. Even in story-writing he had followed custom, the advice of experts and the leading of his literary agent. Here was a business in which no other people were engaged, where there were no rules to follow, and where a mistake might land him in worse than difficulties. He would have to manufacture his own mechanism, guide it and direct it.

The most essential part of that mechanism was its human element.

He had fished with the Devonshire men of Plymouth and Brixham, and the thought of them had sprung to his mind at Behrens', but it was some years now since he had been on the Devonshire coast, and he had forgotten the very names of the men he had known there, but he had not forgotten certain facts about the Devonshire fishing people. They were like a huge family; they knew one another's affairs, and a man going off to the Mediterranean on a job like this would be sure to talk of it when he got back.

And it was not a question of one man. He would want half a dozen.

Half a dozen men chattering on their return would mean that the port authorities, who are all in touch with the fisherfolk, would know of the matter in a week. Bribery would be no use; Bobby had enough imagination to see that a gallon of cider would be enough to undo the business, no matter how much money was spent on bribery.

Well, failing Devonshire, where else could men be found? The docks? He knew enough of the docks to understand that this would be a very difficult place to work. There were loads of men to be found on the East India Dock Road, or down in Lambert Road, Canning Town. But what sort of men? Men from the deep-sea ships, steamboat men, who knew nothing of the handling of small sailing craft; men whose characters might be good or might be bad.

Then, leaving the men aside, how about the vessel? Where could he go for a boat to suit his purpose?

At two o'clock in the morning, by which time the whole proposition had taken on the colours of a nightmare and Behrens the appearance of a fiend, Bobby was knocking out the ashes of his last pipe, when before him rose like an angel the picture of Samuel Hackett.

Sam, bronzed and weather-beaten, just as he had seen him in the restaurant; Sam, with his old coat and scrubby beard and his absolute indifference to all things earthly but his "boat" and the sea; Sam, who lived as the gulls live in Poole Harbour; the man of all men to help, or at least point out where help might be obtained.

Bobby put out the light in his sitting-room, switched on the light in his bedroom, and went to bed, feeling that the weight of a world had been taken from his shoulders.

Sam, from a man, had become an inspiration, a refuge, a star. Fantastic fears assailed Bobby as he lay awake in the dark revolving the picture of Hackett in his mind, suggestions that Sam in his peregrinations in search of a suit of oilskins might have been run over by an omnibus, or that he might fall sick, or be drowned before Bobby could get at him. No mother was ever more anxious for the safety of a child; yet a few hours ago news of the death of this precious one would scarcely have moved him.

Then, under the alchemy of drowsiness, the vision of Sam turned into the picture of Martia Hare, and then came sleep, profound and dreamless, as it only comes to the young.

CHAPTER VI

MISS BEAMAN

He was up at eight o'clock next morning, was dressed and out by nine. An hour too soon. At nine o'clock London is seemingly awake, but with its eyes still closed.

He walked from Sloane Square to Charing Cross and then on to Fleet Street, arriving at White Lion Court a few minutes after ten. Martia had not arrived yet, but the senior partner, Miss Beaman, was there—a capable, middle-aged woman who received him and held him in talk till the arrival of the junior.

Rose Beaman was one of those people who do not hang on formalities. She talked to Bobby as though she had known him all her life; she talked of his work and she talked of her partner.

Martia was killing herself with work; she was one of those conscientious people who slave themselves to death over detail; she had taken only a week's holiday that summer, and a month would not have been too much.

"You see," said Miss Beaman, "it all depends on the person and where they were born. A born Londoner is different from a person brought up in the country. I have known Martia since she was a child. We used to call her March Hare, she was so wild and such a tom-boy: now she is like a creature tamed and depressed by captivity. Cities are all wrong, it seems to me; great prisons—work-houses—where the people are quite content, not because they ought to be content but because they are subdued to their surroundings."

Then the arrival of the discussed one broke off the conversation, and a minute later Bobby found himself tête-à-tête with her and trying to explain Behrens' whole proposition in a few words.

"He's backing me to the extent of three thousand pounds," he finished at last, "and we are to divide the profits. And that brings me to what I want to say. You introduced me to this business and, of course, your firm must have a share in it."

The girl laughed.

"I think we will discuss that," said she, "when we see how things turn out. There mightn't be anything to share. Then, again, it's all very well to say we ought to share in the profits, but how about the work and the danger of the business? It was no trouble to me to give you an introduction to Mr. Behrens. He asks you to take the matter up; you take all sorts of risks and the work is sure to be hard. Why should we take a commission when we run no risks with you and do no work?"

She spoke without animation, in a tired way. Here, in the full light of morning, Bobby began to perceive the truth of Miss Beaman's words. March Hare, the light-hearted creature of other days pictured by Miss Beaman, was far from being suggested by this girl, fading in the air of Fleet Street, exhausted by office work and the struggle with editors, authors, clerks, typewriters, and all the gnomes and fiends that move behind the great set stage of Storyland.

Bobby sometimes had luminous ideas; one came to him now.

"Why not?" asked he.

"Why not what?" asked she.

"Share in the risks and the work. Take a holiday and come with us. I'm not joking. We'll only be a few months, and think of it—think of it," said Bobby, almost frightened at the daring of the proposal, which in the Victorian age would have caused him to be exterminated by an outraged parent or guardian, but which left Martia Hare quite unshocked—she had, indeed, driven an ambulance in the Great War. "Think of it! There was never such an expedition before. Think of the fun and the excitement? Fishing? It beats fishing hollow. It's not fishing for fish but for old gods and things. There's no knowing what we may get up out of that place. Think of the Greek Islands! It's a regular town, streets and buildings, all covered with shallow water clear as a diamond. Hyalos is the name of it."

"Don't," said the girl almost irritably. "How could I? I'm tied to my work. It's like holding out an apple to a donkey that's behind bars and can't reach it. Would I come? Of course I would come, if I were free."

"Miss Beaman said you were working yourself to death, and that you wanted a long holiday. She'd let you free soon enough. Besides, you're a partner, aren't you? And it's business; you would have your commission on your share!"

"It's impossible," said Martia. "There are too many things to be done here."

"Leaving everything else aside," said he, "your brains would help to make the thing a success. I'm not a brainy person, at all events in that way. I'm always forgetting things. Well, say this at all events; say that you'll think of it."

"I'm sure to do that," she answered, with a sigh.

"I mean as a business proposition. Promise me to think it over and try and find some way by which you may be able to come."

"Yes, I'll do that, if you wish, but it's hopeless."

"No, that's no use. Promise me that you will put the hopelessness aside and really think of it and try and find some way out. Think it out like a problem."

"Very well. I will."

"Remember you will be one of the expedition, so you'll have no expenses. Oh, promise me another thing."

"What?"

"That you'll talk the matter over with Miss Beaman."

"But I thought it was to be kept a secret?"

"So it is. But Miss Beaman is safe."

"Very well. I will talk to her about it."

He looked at his watch.

"Now I must be going. I have to catch the train to Bournemouth and get to Poole Harbour to see a man I know there who may be able to help me. May I come to-morrow and tell you how I am getting on?"

"Yes, certainly," said Martia, looking at the clock behind him. "Have you got your luggage with you or will you have to go home to pack?"

"Which luggage?" asked Bobby.

"Well, a bag or something. You see, Poole is a good way from Bournemouth, and you mayn't be able to get back to-night."

He hadn't thought of this. He had reckoned in a hazy way that he could be back by the evening.

"There you are," said he. "I clean forgot all about that. You remember the first time I saw you you said I was a forgetful person. I am. I'll just have to buy a toothbrush and a few things on the way to the station."

Off he went, and the girl sat for a moment looking at the morning correspondence before her on the desk, but gazing in reality at the mental picture of Bobby and his irresponsibility. She knew his character quite well by now—or so she thought. Anyhow, she knew pieces of it. Picking up the railway guide that lay on her desk, she followed the traveller in her mind. She found that the proper way to get to Poole is not to go to Bournemouth but to Poole, direct.

CHAPTER VII

POOLE

He found this out later in the day at the cost of considerable time.

Forgetfulness and carelessness as to details are not assets in the conduct of business dealings with a world that goes by time-table and is mostly inhabited by practical folk, to say nothing of sharks.

It was after four o'clock when he reached his destination.

The old, quaint town of Poole stands by a natural harbour all pockets and dents and much used by fishing boats and various sailing craft. The tide here ebbs and flows twice in the twelve hours and at low water the mud banks, the sand banks, and the slob lands emerge, or hint of themselves, beneath the swarms of chanting gulls.

Bobby had bought a cheap attaché-case, a toothbrush, and a suit of pyjamas on the way to the station. These he deposited at the Anchor Inn, whilst he started out to hunt for Samuel Hackett.

The waiter at the Anchor knew of Sam, had seen him on the wharf that morning, and reckoned that he would be aboard his boat, which was anchored out towards Brownsea Island.

On the wharf Bobby fell in with an old longshore crab, who offered to take him out to "Muster" Hackett's boat for five shillings.

Bowler was his name, and on the row out Bobby, if he had listened, might have gathered not only the name of the oarsman, but his age and the age of his wife, the number of his children, the parlous state of Poole as a seaport, and the condition of the Christchurch salmon fishing.

But he was not listening. The great harbour in the evening light, with Corfe Castle against the sunset and the ring dottrels and curlews flighting around Brownsea Island, held his mind from all else.

The sea-marks rippling to the tide, that was just beginning to ebb, held his eye, and then the sandbanks at the mouth showed their gorse and yellow dunes as the boat drew up to a yawl, over the stern of which a man in a bo'sun's chair was hanging, paint brush in hand and busy at work.

It was Hackett.

"Hallo!" cried Bobby, as the boat drew up.

"Mind my paint!" cried Hackett. "Bring her round to starboard. Good lord, Bobby, where on earth have you sprung from?"

"Come to pay you a visit about something important. Can I come aboard?"

"Can you come on board? One minute."

He got on deck, threw down the ladder, and helped the visitor overside. Then he ordered Bowler to take the boat back.

"But I've left my luggage at that inn place," said Bobby.

"You don't want luggage here," said Sam. "I can give you all you want, and you can have the dinghy to go back in whenever you want to go. You can stay the night, anyhow, can't you? This is the Sandfly. Ain't she a little beauty?"

Bobby looked around him, at the narrow deck, the taut standing-rigging, the neatly-coiled ropes. He saw nothing beautiful, but he did not say so.

She was a ten-tonner with a cockpit leading into a little cabin where the head-room was so low that Bobby had to stoop when standing. He sat down on a cushioned locker whilst Sam offered whisky and a box of Burma cheroots, which he fetched down from a net shelf. Whilst he fussed about, the visitor looked around him.

There was nothing here that could carry away in bad weather. Everything was plain but clean, and the only decorations were some photographs nailed to a bulkhead; photographs of ships and small yachts—the ruling passion.

"How long have you had her?" asked Bobby, referring to the Sandfly.

"Got her the season before last," replied Sam, soda-syphon in hand. "Say when. Got her at Cowes. Her only fault is, she's a wet boat. But you can't have everything unless you have money."

"Ever been a long distance in her?"

"Only to Cherbourg and Boulogne. She's too small for long cruising with comfort. That seat easy?"

"Quite. Look here, Sam, I've come down to you about a thing, one of the biggest things I've ever struck. What sized boat would you want for a cruise to the Mediterranean, a deep-sea expedition to the Greek Islands, taking a diver and all his traps, and five or six for a crew?"

"What on earth would you want with a diver?"

"Never mind that. I'll tell you in a minute. What I want to know first is the size of the boat."

"Well," said Sam, "a forty- or fifty-tonner would be best, ketch or yawl rigged for choice, and a good sea boat. The Mediterranean is the devil sometimes. But why do you ask?"

"I'll tell you, Sam, if you'll swear on the soles of your boots never to let it out. I can trust you, can't I?"

"I never talk."

"Well, it's this way."

Bobby, leaning forward, began his story. Sure of his man, he told everything from start to finish, and Sam, curled up on the opposite side of the table, his old pipe in his mouth, absorbed the tale.

But the romantic part of it seemed to leave him quite unmoved. The town under the sea, the treasures of art to be recovered from it, the dangers of the expedition—all these were nothing to Samuel Hackett.

"You'd want a forty-tonner at least," said he, when the story was over, "auxiliary-engined. Yawl for choice. You'd want a boat for the diving pump and a dinghy. What's this you said? Statues and things? Well, statues are pretty heavy, ain't they? Well, you might use the anchor winch or rig a tackle for getting them up, but you'd want storage room. What are you prepared to spend?"

"Well, how much do you think a boat like that would cost?"

"Oh, eight hundred to a thousand."

"Do you know of any boat that would do?"

Sam fell into a reverie.

"Well, if you're not particular as to appearances," said he, "there's the Lorna Doone. She's alongside the wharf at Poole now. Ketch over forty ton. Just been re-masted and the hull's as sound as I am. Purbeck, the chap that owns her, had her fitted out for cruising and only used her once this season, because of the masts, but they are right enough now. He's been hit on the Stock Exchange, and I believe he'd sell. He picked her up cheap."

"She'd do if she's sound. Sam, look here, supposing I could get her, or some other boat as good, will you come along and lend a hand?"

"Me!"

"Yes, you. It'll be no end of fun, and I'll make it worth your while. I'm on my beam ends. I know next to nothing about this sea business and you're an expert."

"No," said Sam. "I couldn't go. I can't leave the boat."

"But why on earth can't you?"

"Oh, I've a lot of repairs to do to her this winter. You don't know what a boat requires in that way. There's no end to be done to her. But I'll help you in any other way I can. I can get you the men you want, and see you right about stores, and all that. I can get you Glastonbury, the chief diver of the Poole Construction Board—or was till he quarrelled with them last June. He'd take on a winter job down south."

"But I don't want a man who will talk."

"Glastonbury isn't a man; he's a diving machine," replied Hackett. "And now come along and help me to get dinner ready."

In a microscopic galley for'ard of the hole where the sleeping bunks were, Sam produced eggs from a basket and eight slices of raw bacon wrapped in the financial page of the Times.

"There'll be enough for dinner to-night, and breakfast to-morrow morning," said Sam. "I'd have got beefsteak if I'd known you were coming. Hold on to this whilst I light the stove."

The stove smoked and stank, the place became filled with the lee-shore sound of frying bacon, a sound as of waves tearing the shrieking shale to their hearts, above which came the shouting of Sam giving directions as to the laying of the table in the cabin, and the gash-gash of eggs being sacrificed.

"You'll find the knives and forks in the starboard afterlocker. And the cloth!" cried Sam. "And the cups—we'll have coffee. I'll fetch the bread along."

Then as they dined, a rising breeze dispelling the perfume of paraffin and filling the cabin with delicious harbour scents and voices of guillemots and tern, shell-ducks, and dottrel, from the emerging mudbanks and sandpits, Sam took up the theme of the Lorna Doone, and the voyage down south.

Bobby noticed that he seemed more enthusiastic over the business than he had been an hour before. The thing had evidently sunk into his mind, arousing all the passions of the small yachtsman who is never so happy as when he is fitting out and fiddling over gadgets. He talked of the Lorna Doone with enthusiasm. She had an auxiliary engine, it seemed, and a propeller shaft piercing the port quarter. The propeller, he explained, was not directly behind the rudder as in a steamer, but sticking out at an angle. It was a patent propeller that opened out like an umbrella when revolving, and closed up when not in use. She had water tanks capable of holding five hundred gallons. She had beautiful sleeping accommodation, a cabin aft of the main cabin, and a bath-room.

"But you'll see her to-morrow," said Sam. "I'll row you over after breakfast, and we'll find Purbeck at the inn."

They sat on deck after dinner, smoking and watching the lights of Poole, and the lights on the sandpit, talking but little—for everything that Sam had ever learned, at Oxford or London or from life in general, seemed to have been ousted for a general cargo of sea-craft lore ranging from the question of main sheet buffers to the burning subject of water-ballast as a substitute for metal.

Then they turned in.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PURCHASE OF THE "LORNA DOONE"

Bobby was awakened by a lamenting voice, or, rather, chorus—the gulls.

He came on deck to find the sun pushing up from behind the sandspit. Black and white sheldrakes were fishing round the Sandfly, and a flock of curlews showed, making away towards the trough of Poole.

Breakfast was over by eight, and half an hour later, rowed by Sam, they were landing at the wharf where the Lorna Doone was moored—a white-painted, broad-beamed ketch of some forty-five or fifty tons, new masted, as one could easily see, and with the Poole yacht club flag at her jack-staff.

All the same, and despite her new paint, new masts, and gaily fluttering flag, she did not look it. Did not look the yacht her owner made her out to be. Her builders had never meant her to play this part. They had meant her for trawling, for beating against North Sea weather, for carrying tons of fish and discharging them on Grimsby wharves, maybe even for the Icelandic banks and the seas off Flugasker. A plain work-woman in silks and satin and a diamond tiara, that is what she looked like, but Sam said her heart was good.

From the wharf they dropped on to her deck, where a shipkeeper received them.

"Mr. Purbeck ain't down yet," said the man, "but he won't have no objection to you looking over her. Thinkin' of buyin', are you? Well, you might do worse. Purbeck ain't down yet. Been celebratin' at the inn till lord knows what o'clock with some of them young chaps from the club. Mighty free he is with his money to everyone, but those that serve him; a pound a week is good enough for the likes of me, and him cuttin' and shinin' ashore, champagne corks poppin' like guns and cigars as big as your leg and——"

"Jim," said Hackett, seized with a sudden brain wave, "do you want to earn half-a-crown?"

"Spit it out!" said Jim.

"What did Purbeck pay for her?"

"Three hundred and fifty," replied Jim, "and the masts and standin' riggin' and paint cost him another hundred. Cough up your half-crown."

The money changed hands and they went below. Yes, everything was as Hackett had said. A comfortable cabin with an after cabin, a sleeping cabin leading forward to a galley, a fo'c'sle, a bath-room, metal ballast, and a general appearance of solidity and soundness that appealed even to the inexperienced eyes of Bobby.

On deck it was the same, from the anchor-winch to the wheel.

"Now," said Sam, as they scrambled on to the wharf, "we'll go and see Purbeck. You ought to get her for five hundred, or six at the most. He wants to sell, and the winter is before him and there aren't many buyers about, not for a boat like her. I'll do the business for you and you keep your mouth shut."

They found Purbeck at breakfast at the inn; a stout and red-faced individual with small blue eyes and a blue serge coat with brass buttons on it.

Sam knew him.

"Hello, Purbeck," said Sam, ringing the coffee-room bell. "Didn't know you were here. I've just been looking at that boat of yours. Two glasses of beer"—to the waiter who had answered the bell. "A friend of mine is wanting a boat—are you selling?"

"That depends," said Purbeck. "I'd thought of selling, but, to tell you the truth, I've scarcely the heart to. I'm used to her. There's nothing to touch her on the coast, and I've made arrangements to lay her up for the winter by Nicholson's yard."

"Well, she's a bit too small, anyhow," said Sam. "You don't by chance happen to know of a boat a wee bit bigger, yawl for choice? By the way, what were you thinking of asking for her when you thought of selling—if it's not a rude question?"

"Twelve hundred," said Purbeck.

"Twelve hundred? Oh, that's no use to us, even if she was big enough. Fifty-five is what we thought of. This is Mr. Lestrange. He's the man who wants to buy. But he can't afford big money. Why, laying her up for the winter will knock a lot off her value. It's not as if you were selling at the beginning of the season. But, of course, that's your affair."

Then began a long conversation on the question of laying a yacht up for the winter, and Bobby, as he sat listening to these two yachting toughs manœuvring for a stranglehold, thought the deal off. But it wasn't, by any means.

Slowly and by degrees they got down to tin-tacks and prices, Sam shamelessly dropping the question of the boat being too small, and Purbeck, robed in the garb of the hypothetical, suggesting prices that he might accept were he disposed by any chance to enter on a deal.

Bobby left them at it, and went out to smoke a pipe.

Half an hour later Sam joined him, flushed under his tan and exhausted.

"He'll take seven hundred," said Sam. "I can't beat him down a penny more. Seven hundred as she stands, without anything taken off her, and ready for sea; everything in the sail-room, the galley as it stands, and the cabins—bunk-bedding—everything."

"Would you advise me to close?" asked Bobby.

"I would. You won't do better and might do a lot worse. She's a sound boat, and you can sell her when you've done with her."

"Well, I hadn't thought of that before. That makes it easier. You see, Sam, I'm dealing in this matter with old Behrens' money, not my own, and I have to go carefully. You're sure she's big enough for Mediterranean work?"

"Oh, gosh, yes."

"Then I'll close. Behrens will send him the cheque to-morrow."

They went back to the inn and concluded matters with Purbeck, who would make out all the necessary papers and hand them over to Sam on receipt of the cheque. Then Bobby collected his traps and made for the station, Hackett accompanying him.

The soul of Sam seemed upraised by the triumphant conclusion of the deal. It was more. It was trapped, entangled, snared like a rabbit by the sticks and strings of the Lorna Doone. She had taken possession of him just as a woman takes possession of a man, and his love for the Sandfly was under eclipse.

He was married to the Sandfly, and up to last night he had been quite happy with her, but this morning had made all the difference. He had gone over the Lorna with the eyes of a prospective buyer, approved of her, and finally bargained for her. It is true he had bargained for her on behalf of another man. That made no difference. The act had somehow tied him and her together. He was already beginning to dream of the contents of her sail-room, asking himself how she would go under a spinnaker, telling himself that he had been blind to her up to this, that her lines of strength were in reality lines of beauty—the only beauty worth having. And only a week ago he had called her a tub!

It was the beginning of the sort of thing that leads a man into the divorce court. To-morrow he would be telling himself that the Sandfly was a soap-dish, a toy, a woman's boat.

Bobby, in some subtle and extraordinary manner, sensed something of this as they stood together at the station waiting for the London train that was to take him to Town.

"Well," said he, "it's good of you to have taken all this trouble, and to promise to help in getting me my crew, but there's one thing I do wish, and that is that you were going with us in command."

"How do you mean in command?"

"I mean if you had thought of going with us I'd have asked you to take charge; you'd have been captain. But I suppose it's not to be. Anyhow, you'll give a hand, won't you, in getting things together, and when the business is finished with Purbeck I give you carte blanche to go over and see what's wanted, and make any alterations or improvements, if it won't take too much of your time."

"I'll give an eye to her," said Sam. "Make your mind easy. And take it from me you've got a boat that won't let you down. I'll have her dry-docked at Mattheson's and go over the copper, and I'll let you know anything that's wanted. Don't bother about the crew and all that. I'll see to everything."

Then the train came in and Bobby went off, and Samuel Hackett, slowly retracing his steps to the inn, had a glass of beer, lit his pipe, and returned to the wharfside, standing with his hands in his pockets and his eyes fixed in contemplation on the new boat that had come into his life.

The boat that yesterday had been nothing to him. Blind, blind he had been, yet blind chiefly because she was above the tonnage that he had been accustomed to. She was too big to work single-handed.

He got into his dinghy and returned to the Sandfly, tied up and came on board, got the paint and brush and went on with the interrupted business of yesterday. But it was no longer entirely a labour of love. His mind was elsewhere, pleasantly occupied, yet uneasy.

CHAPTER IX

MARTIA

In the train the purchaser of the Lorna Doone began to have misgivings. He had agreed to pay seven hundred pounds for the boat, and now, away from the small-yacht atmosphere of Poole, and beyond the magnetism of Hackett, the amount seemed enormous and out of all proportion to the size of the purchase.

Seven hundred pounds, and that was only the start, the first day's work, so to speak. Almost a third of the money at his disposal gone at one blow. What would Behrens say?

At Victoria he took a taxi and drove to Museum Street, where he found the art-dealer in his shop looking over a case of Cosway miniatures he had just purchased.

"Good-day," said the old man as Bobby came towards him past the show-case and suits of armour. "Come and look at my beauties. Seventeen hundred pounds they have cost me. Well, what news of our expedition?"

"It has cost you seven hundred already," said Bobby, "but I believe the thing is half done."

Then he told.

Behrens did not seem at all alarmed at the tale.

"This Mr. Hackett is an expert in his way?" said he.

"The best man in England," replied Bobby.

"Well, there you are. You have begun well by choosing a good man. Napoleon's battles were all won, not by Napoleon, but by the men he chose to win them. This Mr. Hackett, you say, will choose your crew and your captain? That is as it should be. And when do you think you can get away?"

"Hackett said we ought to be out in a fortnight."

"That is better still. You have done well. And do not trouble too much about the expense. The boat will be insured, and on her return she will be saleable. I do not know anything of boats, but I do of prices in general, and I reckon she will sell for half what she cost."

"Oh, more than that."

"No matter. I put it at half. So already we have spent only three hundred and fifty pounds. Now to another matter. I have seen our friend Miss Hare."

"Yes?"

"She called upon me yesterday. As I told you, I have known her from childhood. She is a good girl. Good in all ways. Did you know that she was engaged to Isaac?"

"To your son?"

"Yes, to my son. He who discovered Hyalos, and for whose sake and to whose memory I am financing this expedition. I speak sentimentally. I hope to make a large profit out of it for myself and for you, but in my heart of hearts the memory of my Isaac stirs and gives colour to the whole thing. He so wished that I should profit from it."

The old man leaned on the case of cameos and seemed for a moment to forget his hearer, who stood without speaking, scarcely heeding the naïve confession about profit, engrossed by this new fact.

Martia Hare had been engaged to Isaac Behrens; had loved him, without doubt, and without doubt loved him still.

He knew now the reason of the far-away look of sadness that had come into her face when she told him about the death of Isaac.

It was as though a ghost had suddenly come between himself and this girl who had been living in his thoughts ever since he first met her. She had been one of his chief inspirations in this business, she had got into his heart, but he had not known how much he really cared for her till now.

"She called on me yesterday," went on Behrens, knowing nothing of what was passing in the other's mind, "she told me you had asked her to join in this expedition and that she had told you it was impossible, that she could not by any means leave her work. Then as she told me that she began to cry. Women are women. I said to her, 'Martia, you want to go with this expedition to Hyalos to see the wonder that poor Isaac discovered and on which he set his heart'; she said, 'Yes,' and I said, 'You shall go, work or no work, you shall go even if I have to pay Miss Beaman, your partner, for any loss that may be sustained by the business during your absence. But there will be no loss. I am an old business man and I know that businesses have a habit of carrying on, even though one of the partners be taken away. You shall see Isaac's city.' Women are strange people. It was the one desire of her heart to go, yet she fought against the idea till I prevailed. I called a cab, and leaving this place in charge of my man I took her to Miss Beaman, who made no difficulty about the matter. Indeed she was entirely with me. So the thing is settled, if you think the boat you have chosen will not expose her to too great hardships."

"I had her in mind when I was looking over the boat," said Bobby. "I had made her promise to think about coming with us. The boat is all right, there is plenty of accommodation, and an after-cabin she can have. When I asked her, one of the things that prompted me was the fact that she was looking dog-tired and in need of a change. Of course, I have only known her a short time, but that was how it seemed to me. She's one of the people who work themselves to death, and she's one of the people who were made, it seems to me, for the open air, not a stuffy office. Of course, the Lorna Doone is small, but Hackett says she's safe, and that one could go round the world in her. But I can explain all that to Miss Hare, and I will call on her to-morrow, first thing."

"Do so," said Behrens, "and let me know all about it. Now to business. I will send that cheque to-night to your friend Hackett. The purchase papers will be made out in my name. It is just as well. And you? Have you enough money to carry on with?"

"Plenty."

"You will keep an account of your expenses and let me have the bill?"

"Yes."

"Then," said Behrens, "that closes the matter for the present. Keep me informed how things go from day to day. I am always in at night, and there is always a cup of coffee awaiting you."

Then Bobby found himself in the street.

It was ten minutes to three. He had plenty of time to reach White Lion Court and see Martia before the office closed. But something held him back—the idea of Isaac Behrens.

His feeling towards Martia had not altered, but something had pushed her away from him ever so little. He wanted time to accommodate himself to the new fact that she had been in love with another man, that she loved his memory still, and that if she went on this expedition her main reason for going would be to visit the place Isaac had discovered and to help in realising his dream.

You cannot be jealous of a dead man; yet a dead man may stand between you and the woman you care for.

Bobby understood this fact for the first time in his life as he came along New Oxford Street, making towards Oxford Circus. By the time he reached the Circus his mind had settled down and become clear. His plan was made. He would dismiss from his thoughts all things other than the expedition and its needs till the affair was over. Martia was coming with him; well and good. She would be one of the party, nothing more. Love had nothing to do with a business like this. It had to be cut clean out. After everything was over things might be different, but, till everything was over and success grasped, hard work would be the order of the day. Hard work, attention to detail, watchfulness, and unswerving determination—those were the four essentials.

CHAPTER X

DEEP SEA GEAR

He put his hand to his breast pocket and drew out the envelope on the back of which Sam had scribbled the address of the deep-sea diving outfit company. The great firm that supplies all the pearl fisheries of the world with their diving equipment, to say nothing of the harbour boards.

Truly Behrens was right when he spoke of the importance of men and the importance of being able to choose men, for Bobby might have been days wandering about on this diving-dress business, and gone, perhaps, to some second-hand dealer, but for Hackett.

There is one thing you must not skimp money over, and that is diving equipment.

He reached Bermondsey at ten minutes to four o'clock, and at four found himself at the works, which are situated in the Grange Road.

By five o'clock he had made his purchases: a three-cylinder air pump, a helmet and gun-metal corselet, two diving dresses of bark-tanned twilled cloth, three fifty feet lengths of rubber floating air hose tested to two hundred and fifty pounds to the square inch, boots, signal line, lead weights, special underclothing, and all sorts of sundries from spare helmet glasses to wrist rings—the total cost under a hundred and fifty pounds, also packing-cases. The whole to be packed and despatched to him on board the Lorna Doone at Miller's Quay, Poole, Dorset.

Then he came West, well satisfied with his day's work, dined at a restaurant, went home and fell asleep, waking next morning to find a letter from Hackett, sent by the last post from Bournemouth. Sam's handwriting, despite his public school and Oxford education, was that of a school-boy, but the letter itself was full of fire and passion. It might have been the letter of a lover describing his mistress.

"When I left you," wrote Sam, "I went back to the Sandfly and tinkered about, but I couldn't help going back to the Lorna and having a look round. What possessed Purbeck to part with her, I don't know. Jim was off her, so I had her to myself. You can't get at the innards of a boat unless you're alone on her, with no one to bother and take one's mind off business. Of course, I knew she was good when I recommended you to buy, but I did not know how good she was. There's not a square inch of dry rot anywhere. How could there be? It's all teak, and though she was built somewhere before the war, she's better than new. The auxiliary engine wants nothing done to it, and the sails in the sail-room are in good condition; but there's no try-sail. We must have a try-sail. That brute Purbeck mishandled her. Nothing much, but coming in last time he touched on the West Point sandspit and she wants a new bobstay. He must have been drunk. Adams, one of the crew he had, told me of it this afternoon. Well, no more at present.

"Yours,
"Sam Hackett.

"P.S.—I have thought of the men we'll want for a crew, and I believe I have got you a skipper."

The last eight words were heavily underlined. Bobby laughed as he put the letter back in its envelope and started to dress. Sam must evidently have sent a special messenger or gone himself to Bournemouth to get it off by the last post. He was keen as paint and his keenness had been born of his sudden love for the Lorna Doone.

From half a lifetime's study of small-yachtsmen, I can say that cases like that of Sam are not uncommon. I have seen a man making a fool of himself over a boat, waste his money over her clothes in the form of sails, and her jewellery, in the form of extra-patent, sure-to-stick-at-the-last-moment gadgets, only to be let down by her in a squall off the Needles because she was not honest. I have seen a boat come between a man and his wife, and have seen a "triangle" of a man and a girl and a boat—and the girl get the worst of it.

Sam had dreamt of the Lorna Doone, and after an early breakfast he was on board her making notes of things that required looking to at the same time that Bobby, having left his rooms, was making for White Lion Court.

He found Martia just arrived at the office.

It was as though she had turned into another person. The look of tiredness had gone from her. She had more colour. Her eyes were brighter and she laughed as she greeted him.

"I'm coming," said Martia. "I never, never thought I could do it, but Mr. Behrens has taken things in hand. He's making me go. Not that I wanted much making, but still, he's settled things."

"I know," said Bobby. "I saw him and he told me, and I've got the boat."

He explained, telling how by good luck he had got a man to look after things and find not only the boat but a crew.

"What's his name?" asked Martia.

"Hackett. He was up with me at Oxford. He's an awfully good chap, and what he doesn't know about boats isn't worth knowing."

"Is his other name Samuel?"

"Yes."

"Oh!"

"D'you know him?"

"I knew a Samuel Hackett once, but I don't suppose it's the same. And it doesn't matter," replied Martia. "And now, go on and tell me. You've got the boat and the crew—how many men are there in the crew?"

"I don't know. Sam will see to all that."

"And a captain—for you don't know anything about sailing a boat, do you?"

"How do you know that?"

"I didn't. I only guessed."

"Well, I don't know much, as a matter of fact. But Sam will get us a captain."

"And stores and things?"

"Oh, Sam——I mean, we'll see to that," replied Bobby, sick of Sam and the fact that Sam was really, and as far as things had gone, running this expedition. "I've got the diving rig-out."

"You have been busy. Where did you get it?"

"Place in Bermondsey." He had forgotten the name and he took from his breast pocket the envelope on the back of which Hackett had pencilled the name.

The envelope was addressed in a large clear hand to "S. Hackett, Esq., The Yacht Sandfly, Poole." He saw that she had taken in the fact.

"Sam gave it to me," said he as he put the envelope back in his pocket. "And now tell me. Would you be ready to start in a fortnight if we have the boat and everything ready?"

"I could start to-morrow," said Martia.

"Well, we'll hurry up things. You'll like the boat. There's a cabin aft you can have, and the main cabin is large and comfortable, and there's a bath-room. The only bother is the Bay, if we have rough weather."

"Oh, I don't mind weather," said Martia. "I'm never ill."

"I only thought if you cared to escape the Bay you might go overland to Marseilles and pick us up there."

"In a stuffy French train? Never! No, I'll be ready to start whenever you are. Are you going back to Poole?"

"Yes, to-day, after seeing Behrens. I've done everything I want in London and I'll stick down there till we start. Meanwhile I'll keep you informed as to how we are getting on."

She accompanied him through the outer office to the top of the stairs to say good-bye, and then he found himself in Fleet Street, making for Behrens.

He felt dissatisfied and a bit upset. Bobby was always finding out unsatisfactory things about himself, which is a hopeful sign in a young man.

He had started from home that morning quite satisfied with himself and the world, feeling in fact that he had acted pretty smartly in this affair and had overcome difficulties that would have floored many another man. Then, all of a sudden, in his interview with Martia, yet without a word from her, he had discovered that he had done next to nothing, that Hackett had done the whole business and that he, Bobby, had only acted the part of a marionette. Also, he felt vaguely that right from the start he had been the pawn, not the player—the moved one, not the mover.

Martia had introduced him to Behrens, Behrens had put him into the affair, Hackett was practically running it. So he thought, quite forgetting that the real hook upon which everything hung was his own act in closing at once on Behrens' offer. That act showed courage and determination and daring. The three things that make a man, even though he be wanting in nearly everything else.

He did not see this. He felt cheap. And in the omnibus that took him to Museum Street another thing troubled him. What did Martia know of Hackett? Why did she drop the subject so quickly? Evidently she had known him in the past. Had there been anything between them?

He got out at Oxford Circus and walked to Behrens' carrying with him this riddle unsolved.

CHAPTER XI

THE CREW OF BLIND MEN

During the next ten days Bobby Lestrange was busy—busy doing things under the orders of Sam.

They camped in the Sandfly, and to the labours incident on the fitting out of the Lorna Doone were added the labours of cooking their own food and washing-up. Bobby wanted to stop at the inn, but Sam would have none of that.

"You've got to get used to a boat," said Sam, "and you'll be thanking me before you've got through the Gut of Gibraltar."

They had to take the auxiliary engine down, examine it in all its parts, put it together again and run it. They had to renew several ratlines that were doubtful, fit a new mainsheet-buffer and bobstay, and devise a boom to carry a watch-tackle necessary for their work at Hyalos. They had to look to the ballast, fill the water-tanks with five hundred gallons of water, make out the list of stores, receive them and stow them.

Whenever Bobby ventured to ask about the crew and captain, Sam made the same reply:

"That's all right; leave it to me."

But on the evening of the tenth day, as they sat smoking after supper, he broke the silence.

"Everything is ready to put out the day after to-morrow," said he, "and I propose to get the crew to sign on to-morrow. I've got four chaps, not including Glastonbury, the diver, and they're all blind and dumb."

"Good lord!" said Bobby. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking sense. You said you want men who won't come home and chatter about what you are doing. These chaps won't. First there's Glastonbury. He never talks about anything. He's a diver and nothing else; silent as a seal when he's out of the water, same as when he's in. Then there's Bowler, brother of that longshoreman who rowed you off first day you were here. He's a Christchurch man whose one idea is the salmon fishing; his head wouldn't hold two ideas. Then there's Longley, Church, and Atherfield; they are all small-yacht sailors out of jobs. I know them all, and the whole crowd are blind—not the way you mean, but the way I mean. They take no interest in anything but their grub and their pay, and the sea qualities of the boat they are in. You say you expect to fish up Greek statues and things? Well, if you were to fish up the great god Pan, alive and kicking, you wouldn't interest these chaps. They are blind to everything but just the things that matter to them, and it's only those things they talk about. Now, a deep-sea sailor is different. There's a lot of intellect of sorts in a fo'c'sle. They are always talking in the fo'c'sle, and a lot of them read books. But this longshore crowd is different."

"I see," said Bobby. "But how about the skipper?"

Sam laughed.

"I've been looking round for a skipper," said he. "It has given me an awful lot of trouble to make a decision, but I've got one."

"Where is he?"

"Here," replied Sam; "and he won't cost you anything but his grub."

"Do you mean to say you'll come yourself?"

"Unless you have any objection. I can't keep off it. It's not me; it's the Lorna. She's got me in her grip. I've never had her out, but I know she's good. Lines can't lie."

"Well, that's the best news you've given me yet," said Bobby. "I've always been funky of a skipper; some chap that would, maybe, barge in with objections to what we were doing, or maybe try to grab a big share in the deal. But, Sam, you aren't going for nothing. You've got to have a pull out of it some way."

"I've money enough of my own," said Sam, "and I'm going for my own fun. I don't take any interest in your archæological business. You can fish up what you dashed well please, so long as you don't bother me to admire it or hand me out any mythological junk. Well, that's settled, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Bobby.

Suddenly into his mind had come Martia Hare. He had never told Sam that a girl was to be one of the party, simply because he had never looked on Sam as having anything to do with the business except as regards the outfitting. He remembered Martia's inquiry about Sam, and then how she had closed up as though the subject were distasteful to her. Heavens, if there had been anything between these two, anything that would make one not want to sail with the other, what a complication would ensue!

"I didn't tell you," said he, "but there's a girl going."

"Going where?"

"Going with us."

"A girl? But for heaven's sake, man, what are you taking a girl along on an expedition like this for?"

"She's not a girl of the ordinary sort. She's ready to rough it and lend a hand. She told me she could do cooking."

"Who is she?"

"She's a friend of Behrens. He's known her since she was a child, and she's not strong and wants a change. She's my literary agent, and she introduced me to Behrens, and but for her this affair would never have come off."

He spoke hurriedly, keeping back the name and hoping Sam would forget to ask it. There might be nothing in his fears, but it was just as well to risk nothing. The expedition was due off the day after next at the first of the ebb; that is to say, six o'clock in the morning. Martia would not come down till the night before, and there would be no time for Sam to kick, even if he wanted to.

Bobby did not take into account the possibility that there might be some deep misunderstanding or family feud between these two people, making it impossible for them to be messmates. His whole suspicions were based only on the manner of the girl when she closed her inquiries as to Sam. There might be nothing in it. He determined to leave it at that and keep dumb until the critical moment, unless Sam pressed him. But Sam was not bothering about the name of this girl who had suddenly been foisted on him and would be sure to want the after-cabin, which he had mentally reserved for himself as skipper. Sam was not the sort of skipper who sleeps in the chart-room to oblige a lady. He looked on women as a bore and a nuisance in the main business of life—that is to say, small yachting—and his back now was all bristles.

"We've got cooks," he said. "Bowler and Church will take it in turns. And it doesn't seem the thing, taking a girl on a show like this with nothing but men on board."

He was perfectly honest in saying this. Sam was Victorian in a lot of ways—a fact that was no discredit to him, however it might limit his ideas or the range of woman's activities.

"She's driven an ambulance in the war," said Bobby, "and she's the sort of girl who could go anywhere. Doesn't make you feel as if she was a girl, you know."

"All the same," said Sam, "she's outside this job. It's absurd. You are going on an important and risky business and you take a delicate girl along for her health. You said she was delicate. You'll be wanting to take a cow next, I suppose, so that she can have fresh milk every morning. And I suppose she will be wanting the after-cabin?"

"Yes, of course. But the bunks in the sleeping cabin are quite comfortable—you told me that yourself—and there's only you and me, so we won't be crowded."

"I know, but I reckoned on the after-cabin as skipper. I reckoned to keep my charts and things there."

"Well, keep the after-cabin," said Bobby. "Let her bunk in the sleeping cabin and I'll shake down in the galley. I don't mind."

"That's clear nonsense," said the other. "If she comes, she'll have to have the best, naturally. I may be old-fashioned—thank heaven I am—but I have a feeling of respect for women. I suppose it's a part of my make up. A woman's a woman—all the same they're a dashed lot of nuisances."

He tapped his pipe out and the conversation dropped.

An hour later, when they had turned in and the Sandfly, moving to the tide ripples, was rocking them to sleep, Sam's voice came through the darkness.

"What did you say that girl's name was?"

"Which girl's name?"

"The girl who's coming on this show."

"Hare."

"What's her other name?"

"Which other name?"

"Her Christian name."

"March."

"March Hare? Who on earth ever labelled a girl with a name like that?"

"I don't know. Girls are called after the names of months—May and so on—why not March?"

He heard the other snorting and turning in his bunk, and then the even breathing that proclaimed sleep. But Bobby could not sleep for a long time.

Why was Sam so anxious to know the other name? Had he done wrong in not telling him the truth? Might Sam and she have been in love with each other once, or anything like that? He remembered with relief that she had been in love with Isaac Behrens and engaged to him. Still, who could tell how many love affairs and engagements she might have had? On this question, which had no answer, he fell asleep.

CHAPTER XII

MARTIA'S SECRET

Martia had a terrible secret; a secret known only to her mother and herself; a secret only half-guessed by Behrens.

In the war, whilst she had been driving an ambulance, the disaster had occurred which still overshadowed her life.

There are disasters that finish themselves and everything round them, like a bursting shell, in a moment of time, and there are disasters that, having done their work, go on living like horrible reptiles, ruining the lives of their victims, ay, and of their victims' children and grandchildren.

The Hares, before the war, had been very well-to-do, drawing some six thousand a year from a business in Birmingham that seemed solid as the town-hall itself. It tottered under the new condition of things, fell, and went to smithereens, leaving Richard Hare dead amidst the ruins with a pistol bullet in his heart; leaving also his wife, Martia, and his youngest daughter, Violet, almost unprovided for.

Mrs. Hare had a hundred and fifty pounds a year of her own, Violet obtained the post of companion to a woman of means, and Martia joined with Miss Beaman as working partner in the agency. The money she made was just sufficient to maintain herself whilst helping her mother, and in making it she had nearly ruined her health. For several years she had not taken a proper holiday. And on top of everything was the fact of Isaac Behrens' death.

It was old Jacob Behrens who had forced her hand, made her see that work without health was impossible, promised to keep an eye on her mother should any accident happen to the expedition, and by pure will power made her accept a hundred pounds for an outfit and expenses, to be repaid—some day.

"Should the affair be successful, there will be much money in it," said Jacob. "It is a business affair pure and simple. Leaving everything else aside, I wish you to go as a person who has a knowledge of business, and common-sense. I trust Mr. Lestrange completely, but he is younger than his years and has not seen much of the world. I have great faith, too, in a woman's intuition. I owed much of my early success to my wife Sarah. She, with her clear sight, often saved me from rogues and from my own stupidity. So, you see, you will be killing all sorts of birds with the one stone; getting back your health, establishing the business, helping to look after old Jacob's affairs and helping him to make money, of which you shall have your share. Also, Isaac would have wished it. Also, I believe you will bring luck."

He came on the evening of her departure to see her off by the six-thirty train from Waterloo, buying her a first-class ticket and entrusting her with the ship's money, some eight hundred pounds, to hand to Bobby.

Then, as the train glided out of the station and she sat in the corner of the comfortable first-class carriage she had to herself, a sense of relief and release came to her such as she had never before experienced.

Gone were the cares of the office and the weariness and worries of life; Fleet Street and White Lion Court, journeys in omnibuses to save shillings, and all the petty and mean details that make up the life of the poor—not the poor of the slums, but the poor of the middle-classes, who have to keep up an appearance on insufficient means.

She was free, free as a bird. To-morrow she would not awake to breakfast in a hurry and catch the train from Hampstead to the City, there to spend the day wrestling with other people's affairs, returning at night wearied out or going to a theatre she would be too tired to enjoy.

All that was over, for the present at least. Life had turned over for her an entirely fresh page, all the more charming because it was unwritten upon.

Martia had no illusions about Jacob Behrens. She knew him to be a good man; but she knew that he was also a trader, whose business followed him everywhere, and whose business it was to make money. She knew that he was really in earnest in urging her to take up this affair for the benefit of her health, knowing as he did that what she wanted was not only change of air but excitement and an absolutely new environment. But she also knew that his keenness in this matter had been whetted by his estimate of Bobby as a person excellent in every way but as a business man.

So this new blank page that life had turned over for her had the additional attraction that the writing on it would be partly hers in the success or failure of the expedition which it would record.

The express drew into Poole Station at eight minutes past nine, and the first person she saw on the lamp-lit platform was Bobby.

He helped her to get her small luggage from the carriage and her trunk from the van, then, followed by a porter wheeling the lot, they started on foot for the inn.

"Is everything all right?" she asked.

"Everything. The crew's on board; stores, water, and everything. We swung her to-day to test the compass, and we are due out at sunrise. I've got a room for you at the inn for to-night, and they'll wake you up in time to-morrow morning, so that you can settle down and get your gear stowed before we start. Hackett is coming along as skipper."

"Oh!"

"He's the best man we could possibly have, and he's coming just for the fun of the thing."

"Are you sure he is responsible?"

"Quite."

Here was a relief. Evidently she had no objection to Sam, whatever she may have known of him before this.

As he led the way into the coffee-room of the Anchor, they met Hackett, who was just coming out. He had shaved off his beard, and looked like the old Sam again. Bobby introduced him to the girl, and watched as they shook hands.

Yes, without any manner of doubt these two had met before. He could tell by their manner, by their faces, by the way they shook hands. Yet not one word did they say in confirmation of the evident fact. Then, after a few commonplace remarks about the weather and the time of starting in the morning, Sam went off to the boat, where, having seen the girl comfortably settled at the inn, Bobby followed him, found him on deck, and, unable to restrain his curiosity, asked him the question right out.

"Sam," said Bobby, "have you met that girl before?"

"Yes," replied Sam. "And, if it's all the same to you, I'd rather not talk about it."

"I don't want to talk about it or pry into your affairs. It's only just this: when you asked me her other name, I told you the nickname she was known by as a child. I did so because—well, it doesn't matter. But I've only just thought that if there has been any unpleasantness between you and her, I was maybe wrong, and——"

"There has been no unpleasantness," cut in the other. "And if it's all the same to you, we'll say no more on the subject."

"All right," said Bobby. "We'll leave it at that."

He went below and turned in, and lay awake for an hour revolving in his mind the problem of it all. What in the name of common-sense could have happened between these two to make them—having known each other—meet like strangers? Sam had evidently done nothing wrong, or Martia would have refused to sail with him. And Martia couldn't have done anything wrong. Had they cared for one another in the past and quarrelled? No, their manner did not point to that, and Martia, when he told her that Sam was coming along with them, had shown little surprise and no sign of hesitation.

CHAPTER XIII

THE START

Martia was awakened by the maid of the Anchor opening the bedroom door and turning on the light.

It was still dark outside—the sun would not rise for another half an hour or more—and this hurried dressing by lamplight in order to catch the tide and a little boat that would take her to distant and unknown places was the weirdest experience that had yet befallen Martia.

It was the same when she found herself outside the inn, with Bowler carrying her small baggage and making for the quay, against which no big steamer was moored.

Bowler with the luggage, the smell of the harbour, the quay, all called up journeys to the Continent from Dover or Folkestone; but here there was no mail-boat to receive her, no great funnels belching smoke, no crowd, nothing but the stick-like masts of the Lorna Doone against the fading night, and a lantern moving furtively by the quay edge.

There was no need for secrecy or concealment, at least at present. The Lorna's papers were in order, and it was only a question of getting out. All the same there was a suggestion of a hurried and surreptitious departure, not without its charm, in that atmosphere of night and sea scents and sounds.

It was full flood, and the old quay gang-plank used for excursion boats had been rigged leading to the deck of the Lorna, raised by the tide almost to the quay level. Martia crossed the plank and was received on the little deck by Bobby.

She stood for a moment looking around her. The deck looked smaller than it was in reality, and the spars and rigging more fragile and unreliable than daylight would show them. Forward she could see a great bulk. It was Glastonbury. Church and Atherfield were beside him, waiting to attend to the shore fasts. On the quay, talking to them, stood a longshoreman, ready to haul up the gangway and attend to the mooring ropes.

"We'll be off now in a minute," said Bobby. "Sam's below tinkering with the engine. Wouldn't you like to come down and see your cabin?"

"Oh, that can wait," said she. "I wouldn't go down just now for worlds. I want to see it all. It's more like a fairy tale or a dream than anything real I have ever known. Listen to the gulls."

The gulls were clanging against the brightening east beyond Brownsea Island and the sandbanks, and the wind, freshening with the dawn, came charged with their voices and the smell of the open sea. The longshoreman came to the gang-plank, and hauled it in just as Sam rose from the hatch, wiping his hands with a piece of cotton waste, which he flung over the port rail as he turned to the girl and greeted her.

"It's a fair wind," said Sam, "and the glass is as steady as a rock. All your luggage on board?"

"Yes, everything."

"Aren't you going to get any sail on her?" asked Bobby.

"Not till we're out," replied the skipper of the Lorna Doone.

Bobby looked at the other, now fully visible in the morning light.

Sam on his quarter-deck, so to speak, in command of a ship, and about to give orders, was quite a different person from the Sam he had hitherto known. The new Sam was short of speech, a bit aloof, heedless of the girl as though she had been a mere man, and seeming absolutely indifferent to everything but the work in hand. And that was a fact. He was in the grip of the Lorna Doone just as she was in his grip now, as he stood with his hands on the wheel-spokes giving his last orders.

The shore fasts came in, the little engine began to mutter, and the Lorna, gliding gently and dropping the wharf behind her, fronted the sunrise.

Martia did not look back. She was held by the view before her. For in all the world there is nothing lovelier than Poole Harbour in the sunrise of a perfect morning.

Gulls raced them as they glided over the golden water, where the stakes and sea-marks that outlined the passage rippled to the first of the ebb. They passed the Sandfly, deserted and snugged down in her winter dress, and Brownsea Island hailed them with a chanting of gulls, ring-dottrel and herons crossed their course to the lamentable wheezing of guillemots, whilst to complete the picture two white swans from Abbotsbury circled in the sunlight, the boom of their flight feathers filling the air.

Then the sandbanks slid by, and the Isle of Wight showed the white sharpness of the Needles and the banded tubular tower of their lighthouse across the sparkling water, whilst, with the engine shut off, the canvas rose thrashing in the breeze.

Then Martia, to whom all this was as new as it was strange, watched as the great main boom, upheld by the topping lifts, shook and bucked and then swung to port, straining at the main sheet, whilst the great sail, ceasing its struggles, filled hard against the blue, and the Lorna Doone, almost before the wind, drove into the swell to a sound like the fizzing of soda-water.

"She steers," said Sam, seeming to address the universe in general. "A child might handle her. Oh, lord, no!" in answer to a question of Martia's. "We won't start the engine again till we're going into harbour at Genoa. That's all the use auxiliaries are for, or if there's a flat calm close to port. Here you are, Bowler, take the wheel and keep her as she goes."

He handed the wheel over to Bowler, and stood for a moment beside the girl, looking at the distant coast to starboard.

Bobby, who had just come up to tell them that breakfast was ready, stood also to look whilst Sam pointed out the shoremarks to the girl.

"That's Corfe Castle," said he, "and away right over there is St. Alban's head, beyond that is Weymouth Bay and Portland Bill. That? Oh, she's a Union Castle liner."

"What's all that stuff on the sea there?" asked the girl, pointing across the port bow.

"That's oil refuse from some ship. Full of tangled-up seabirds, maybe."

"Tangled-up seabirds?"

"Guillemots. It's generally the guillemots that get caught. They get in the oil, and it tangles their feathers so's they can't fly or swim."

"And what happens to them?"

"They drift about and die of starvation."

"Oh, how frightful! Do people know?"

"Of course they do," replied Sam. "But they don't see it as we see it who use the coast. Nothing is done, though it could be easily stopped. Only just the question of putting oil-separators, that would pay for themselves, on board the ships."

Bobby listened to this talk, thinking less of the conversation than the manner of it. These two were quite easy with one another, like old acquaintances. They were old acquaintances. And yet they had met like dead strangers, and Sam had indicated that he wanted to say nothing about his past relationship with the girl. There was no possible solution of this extraordinary state of things—at least none that Bobby could discover or imagine—and, leaving it at that, he gave them word that breakfast was ready.

Down below, the pleasant sunlight streaming through port and skylight lit the cabin, the white-painted bulkheads, the breakfast things laid out, and a little jar of October flowers provided by Bowler, of all people in the world.

Bowler, who, to look at, seemed as destitute of all the finer feelings as a derrick, hearing that a lady was coming as passenger, had procured the flowers from his brother the longshoreman's garden. An angel could not have done better, for they made the girl feel instantly at home.

"And this is your cabin," said Bobby, opening the door of the cubby-hole and exposing to view the bunk with its neat coverlet, the gadgets for holding things secure against the roll of the ship, and a bookshelf with a tiny library—an after-thought provided only the day before at Bournemouth.

She looked in, lost in admiration. Then, turning and casting her eyes over everything, from the cabin carpet to the lamps swaying on their gimbals, she heaved a sigh and tried to find words to express her feelings.

"Why, it's just like a little steamboat," she said. "It's absolutely and perfectly wonderful!"

A little steamboat!

Sam's jaw fell. His Lorna Doone compared with a steamboat! However, he swallowed the insult, knowing that it proceeded from ignorance not malice, and they sat down to table.

They had lots to talk about.

It was the first real meeting of the board of directors of this expedition, and Sam, without putting himself into the chair, soon exhibited the qualities of chairman and leader. He had received the ship's money from Martia and had locked it up in the safe. It would only be needed for accidents, harbour dues, pilotage, and, in the remote event of the auxiliary breaking down on approaching a harbour, towage charges; the crew, who had received advances on their wages, would not be paid off till the Lorna returned to Poole.

They talked this matter over, and then came the question of a Mediterranean base. Neither Bobby nor Martia had thought of this part of the business. They had imagined the Lorna sailing straight ahead to the Greek archipelago without stopping anywhere. Why should they stop? Sam answered that question very easily.

"You see," he said, "we've got to take water on somewhere. Hyalos may have a water supply on it or it mayn't. The fact remains that when we get there our water-tanks will be getting too low unless we touch at some port on the way and fill up. Genoa is the best place for us to touch at. First of all, I know it. Secondly, I can speak Italian of sorts. Thirdly, the port authorities are pretty easy-going. Leaving the water alone, let's come to the question of this stuff you want to salve, and which seems to me pretty much like contraband.

"We must be able to run straight home with it without touching port. Same time, we may have accidents, or Hyalos mayn't have a water source on it, so that, having taken your cargo of antiques or whatever they are on board, we may have to run to a port for water. The thing to do, of course, is to run to a place you're known in, so that you won't have trouble with the Customs smelling round the ship. That's why I want to touch at Genoa, so that coming back we may be known there."

He took from his pocket the map of Hyalos, which Behrens had sent with the ship's money, and spread it on the table before him.

The map showed the town as it lay beneath the water—the streets, the market-place, the theatre, everything—but of the island of Hyalos, beside which the sunken town lay, the map showed little; just the outline of the bay.

"There you are," said Sam. "The fellow who drew this has put in streets, squares, everything about this town that's supposed to be submerged; details that are quite useless to us, seeing that we have eyes in our heads. But of the most essential thing to a working party, the presence or absence of water on the island, he says nothing."

Martia flushed slightly, and Bobby recognised that Sam had put his hoof into it. He could not say, "Isaac Behrens drew that map and she was engaged to him." He tried to catch Sam's eye, but failed.

"He must have been a silly ass," said Sam, still contemplating the map. "You can see he was an archæologist all right, but no headpiece on him for anything else."

Martia crimsoned.

"He was my best friend," said she, "and cleverer than—than a great many people."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know," said Sam.

"Cleverer than a great many people I could name," she went on, anger possessing her for a minute. "And he had headpiece enough to prevent him going off and spoiling his life just in a fit of temper. Anyhow, let us say no more about him."

"Very well," said Sam. "Let us agree to do so. I did not know you knew him or, of course, I would not have said that."

He put the map away, and they rose from the table and went on deck, Bobby greatly wondering at the girl's words. Was it Sam who had gone off and spoiled his life in a fit of temper? If not, why did she fling the words and the implied fact in his face?

When he had met Hackett first of all in the restaurant he had wondered at the change in him, and at the hermit life he was leading. Was it possible that before Isaac Behrens had come into Martia's life Sam and she had been engaged? That Sam had broken it off in a fit of temper and spoiled his life by taking to the small yacht business? It seemed the only possible solution of the mystery.

Half an hour later, when the girl had gone below, he took Sam forward of the wheel, where Church was steering.

"She was engaged to Isaac Behrens," said he. "That's what made her cut up so rough."

"How the deuce was I to know that?" answered the other.

"How do people know anything? You were a friend of hers before I ever knew her."

"Maybe," said Sam.

"Then why did you and she meet last night as though you were strangers, though I could see quite well you had met before? Why did you get ratty with me, and say you didn't want to talk about her? Why did she speak to you like that at breakfast? What's the mystery?"

"There's no mystery. My affairs are my own and we'll be much better friends, Lestrange, if you will recognise that fact and remember it. One might think you were in love with the girl, the way you keep harping on her. Leave the thing alone. We are out on serious work. Forget that she's a girl, as I do, and we'll all be better friends. This is a deep-sea expedition with, maybe, lots of dangers ahead; not a charabanc ride to Margate."

He turned away, and Bobby, snubbed and feeling a bit small, stood with his hands on the starboard rail watching the distant coast.

Sam had put his finger on the spot. He was in love with Martia, and that was the chief reason of all his suspicions and self-questionings as to her possible past relationship to Sam. But he recognised the truth that this expedition was no holiday trip, but an affair difficult and maybe dangerous, in which there was no room for anything but strict attention to business. He determined to think no more of her as a woman till he had proved himself as a man; to put her from his mind except as a companion till the Lorna Doone was berthed at Poole Wharf and the venture a success.

A decision easier come to than observed.

Half an hour later, when the girl came on deck again, the English coast lay a great distance away across the blue and summer-like October sea. Portland Bill was a point on the starboard beam, and before them lay the great stretch of Lyme Bay, marked by the far-off sails of a fishing fleet and the smoke of a coastwise freighter making for Brixham.

Martia seemed to have forgotten all her anger against Sam, and when Bobby, having gone below for a smoke, returned on deck, she was at the wheel, Sam beside her, and Bowler, one great hand on a spoke, "Larning her to steer."

CHAPTER XIV

GENOA

Somewhere about four in the afternoon Start Point showed away on the starboard beam; and with the dark the Eddystone light, sixteen miles or so away, winked at them just within the range of visibility.

The wind had shifted a bit towards the south, and the nip had gone out of the air, but no clouds showed. St. Luke's little summer held the Channel, and the warm dark night was full of lights—lights talking to one another through the great silence that was broken only by the creak of block and spar and the whisper of the bow wash. Bolt Head and the Eddystone and the red and green lights of shipping were all domed by the stars, against which the great spread of the mainsail showed black beneath the truck, writing its tale of adventure on the heavens. They passed Ushant next morning, carrying the fine weather with them into the Bay; they passed the Bay and the Barlengas Islands handed them on to Cape St. Vincent, and then, one day never to be forgotten by Martia, far ahead before them stood Africa facing Europe in a blaze of sunshine across the narrow straits.

The wind was with them—the west wind is generally blowing through the gut of Gibraltar. They passed the Rock, a great P. & O. boat homeward bound giving them her wash and a string of coloured flags that wished them a pleasant voyage. And then, through days of blazing sunshine and nights of stars and winking sea lights, they coasted the southern shores of Spain till the Balearics showed like a cloud on the starboard bow and sank astern like burning ships in the blaze of a sunset never to be forgotten.

Then one morning, just as Martia was dressed, a hail from above brought her on deck, and there across the sea lay Genoa. Genoa terraced and glittering in the early sunlight, above the crowded harbour and the foam-washed breakwater. Genoa throned on her hills facing San Fruitiossa and the tombs of the Dorias across the glittering sea. Genoa la superba, yet a trader at heart now as in the past.

A pilot-boat ran out to meet them, and as the pilot came on board Sam, his work and responsibility finished with for the moment, turned to the rail and lit a pipe, whilst the girl, standing by him, watched as, passing the eastern end of the breakwater, they came into the outer harbour and from there into the inner, beside which lay the great Silos de Genoa.

Genoa is the Southampton of Italy, and here were ships the form and lines and names of which the girl had never imagined or heard of; ships of the Nederland Line and the Holland-Oast-Azie Line; the great South American liner Conte Verde, close to which the pilot moored them; a turret boat of the Clan Line; coasters from Savona, Leghorn, and Naples that seemed to have been built by Noah; an old green ship rotting at its anchorage, and a fruit boat from Sicily full of bronzed men graceful as Apollos.

Then the port authorities came off in their launch, gave them pratique, examined their papers, threw up their hands at the mad English who had come all the way from England in such a small boat just for fun, and departed, smiling—at Martia.

"And now," said Sam, "let's get ashore. Bowler will look after the ship. We can have breakfast at the Mirimare—that's that big hotel up there you can see to the left of the Silos—and then we can go for a cruise round the town."

Martia's mind jumped at the idea, and yet, strangely enough, something held her back. Women have their premonitary warnings that come from nowhere. But her doubt lasted only for a moment.

"Why not have breakfast here and then go ashore?" said she. "It's only half-past eight, and we have the whole day before us."

"I want to stretch my legs," said Sam. "And as we'll be off to-morrow morning, we may as well make the most of our time. Unless you'd rather breakfast here."

"Oh, I don't mind," said she. "If you want to, let's go."

Bowler rowed them ashore, and landing at the quay by the Silos they took the lift that brings passengers from the lower level right into the premises of the great hotel. Here they breakfasted, surrounded by all the nations of the world in the form of tourists. Sam was in the highest of spirits, laughing and talking and self-congratulatory on the success of the voyage up to this.

This was a new Sam. Bobby had never once seen him like this since the Oxford days, and was pleased at the change, little dreaming of the newer Sam he was to see before nightfall.

There is a hairdressing shop for men and women attached to the Mirimare, and after breakfast the skipper of the Lorna Doone, lighting a big cigar and leaving the others seated in the lounge, went off to be barbered.

"I won't be a minute," said Sam.

He was half an hour, and it was ten minutes to eleven before, delivered from the hotel and the lift, they took a tram for the Piazza Differari.

Modern Genoa is divided into two parts, the harbour town and the eastern town of fine shops and business houses.

Having bought some things, they had luncheon at a café on the Piazzo Aqua Verde, and here, after luncheon, they lost Sam. They lost him in a crowd caused by a big Fascist demonstration marching with drums and banners, and they could not find him again.

"He'll be all right," said Bobby. "He knows the place better than we do, and he'll go back to the boat when he's tired. Come on. We haven't done the Campo Santo yet, nor a single church. Which shall it be?"

"The Campo Santo," said Martia. "I've often heard of it, and would like to see it. But are you sure Mr. Hackett will be all right?"

"Absolutely," said Bobby; "and it serves him right being such a fool as to lose himself. We can't hunt for him all day."

He hailed a taxi-cab and drove to the great cemetery, but Martia's interest in the marble tombs, the family groups, the widowers in marble frock coats, and the enormousness and enormity of the whole place was marred by the vision of Sam, lost and maybe still hunting for them, wandering like a stray dog. She felt that they had deserted him, and it was a relief to her when they reached the quay at last and took a shore boat to the Lorna Doone. Sam had not returned.

Bobby looked at his watch.

"It's only half-past five," said he. "He's sure to be back soon. If he isn't, I'll go ashore and have a hunt for him."

"He couldn't have got into trouble or anything?" asked the girl.

"Not he. He's just amusing himself. He'll be back by six."

But six passed without the return of the missing one, and seven. At eight o'clock, as much disturbed as the girl, Bobby put ashore and landed at the Silo quay, told Bowler to stick by the landing-stage with the boat, and started on his hunt. He had not far to go. On a bollard near the shore end of the quay, conversing jocularly with several Italian boatmen and punctuating his remarks with hiccoughs, was seated Sam.

"Hallo," said Sam.

"What on earth have you been doing?" asked Bobby, shocked by this new development and scarcely believing his senses. "Where have you been?"

"All over the place," said the skipper of the Lorna Doone. "Give's your arm."

Now the funny thing was that Bobby, who knew Sam's Oxford record for brightness and liveliness, and who had not seen him for years before their meeting in the restaurant, was shocked by his present condition almost as much as though Samuel had been a rural dean, shall we say.

Yet perhaps the thing was not so funny after all, for the skipper of the Lorna Doone had up to this shown no deviation from the normal. Furthermore, he was not of the type that produces drinking men.

As a matter of fact, Sam did not care for drink in the least in the ordinary way.

"I know," said he, in reply to Bobby's comment, and taking the other's arm. "It's silly of me to get like this. Let's take a walk round. I want to swing my compass before going on board. Not fit to meet her like this."

"Shall I get you a bed at the hotel?" asked Bobby.

"No," said Sam.

They left the quay and walked along the road that leads to the station.

"No," went on the skipper after a long pause, and as if in reply to a repeat of the invitation. "I don't want beds at any hotels. I'll be all right presently, and all the better for it. I meant to do it when I started this morning. I had to get her off my mind."

Bobby felt unhappy. He did not want to hear the confidences of a man whose intellect was under a cloud, and he tried to turn the conversation.

"Forget it all," said he. "You'll be as right as rain when you've had a sleep."

"Forget it all? If you'd got a girl in your head—if you'd gone the mucker I have—if——"

Again Bobby tried to stop him, but Samuel Hackett, taking the bit in his teeth, broke into open confession and spun a yarn—so wandering, however, and so confused that all Bobby could make out was that deponent, sometime in the past, had loved a girl, became engaged to her, broken off the engagement owing to a mutual quarrel, and sacrificed his brilliant future, whatever it was, for the life of a small-yachtsman. He had five hundred a year of his own.

Presumably the girl was Martia Hare, though he mentioned no names, and the close proximity in the Lorna Doone life had brought about this crisis.

This was a nice complex in an affair already complex enough. If Sam, the hub of this expedition, were to be subjected to crises like this every time Martia became too much for his feelings, what might not the upshot be?

It came into Bobby's head just then what Martia had said, in his first interview with her, about editors and their predilection for stories with a female interest, a predilection born of nothing but the business instinct telling them what the public wants. It seemed to him that the public was not far wrong, and that if the interest of any story depended upon its complexity, elements of surprise, and possible dramatic developments, a woman was absolutely necessary in it. All the same, he wasn't writing a story, but engaged in a deal that might lead the whole lot of them into unknown trouble, should any hitch occur.

This fact had been developing in his mind during the voyage, helped, maybe, by the sea air and the absence of all other worries.

Behrens, it seemed to him, had not fully gauged the possibilities of this business if it went wrong. Behrens was an old man whose life had been spent in auction-rooms and the atmosphere of shady deals. He was absolutely to be trusted as a friend, but as a business antagonist he was a bandit pure and simple. He would not cheat a customer or sell faked goods as real stuff, but he would take any and every advantage conferred upon him by his knowledge of business and the length of his purse.

The sacking of Hyalos, to Behrens, was a perfectly legitimate undertaking. To Bobby, during the last fortnight or so, the question had been steadily recurring as to whether Behrens had not underestimated the seriousness of it, should the Greek Government step in by any chance and find them at work.

Bobby had no doubt as to the morality of rescuing for personal profit stuff that had been lying for long centuries under the sea, whenever it might be found. All the same, he had grave doubts as to what the upshot might be should they be detected. The situation was serious, and this grave defect that had suddenly shown itself in Sam made it more so.

After half an hour's walk up and down the vile street by the wharves, the skipper's compass seemed to be coming into order again, and he declared himself fit to return on board.

Martia was on deck when they drew alongside, and she seemed to notice nothing as Sam, on the dark deck and controlling himself, explained that he had "been to the pictures." Then he went below and the girl and Bobby were left alone.

The night was warm as a night in August, and Genoa, spangled with lights, looked down upon her harbour, where the great ships lay with their ports and anchor lights spilling amber on the water. A Dutch boat, ripping up the night with her syren, was putting to sea from the outer harbour, and the tangling of a mandoline came across the water from where the fruit boats lay, beyond the great bulk of the Conte Verde.

Bobby was greatly exercised in his mind. To speak about Sam's recent condition, if he were really in love with Martia, seemed an act of disloyalty, considering that he—Bobby—was also in the same condition as regarded her. Still, it was unfair to the girl to keep silent. She was sharing the risk they all ran and she ought to know everything.

"I'm rather worried about Hackett," said he at last. "He's the best of good fellows, but I think his mind is upset a bit about something, and he's been dining on shore—and——"

"I know," said Martia.

"The bother is," said he, "this isn't an ordinary pleasure cruise. We all want our heads screwed on tight. It's risky, and I'm worried about you."

"Why me?"

"Well, if anything goes wrong, I don't want you to be let in for it. I'm not saying anything will, but, all the same, one never knows. You know how I bothered you to come. Well, I almost wish I hadn't."

"That's nonsense!" said Martia. "I don't mind risk. We are doing nothing wrong. I went into the whole thing in my mind before I decided to come. What we are going to do is no more harm than picking blackberries—blackberries belonging to no one. These things you hope to get belong to no one. That's the whole thing in a nutshell."

This feminine logic seemed to Bobby all right in its way amongst themselves, but dubious as an argument to advance before the government at Athens should fate land them at the Piræus in charge of some wretched tin-pot man-of-war.

"There's still time for you to think twice of it," said he. "You could go home from here."

"Do you want me to go?"

"I do and I don't," replied Bobby.

"Then I won't," said she. "I'm not that sort of person. Mr. Hackett is a splendid sailor, and I have no fear of the sea with him. And if he did behave stupidly to-day, men sometimes do stupid things. I am sure he won't do it again. Besides, he won't be on shore again till we get home. Go back and not see that wonderful place under the sea and have all the fun of fishing for those things? I'd rather die than go back!"

"I'm glad you feel like that," said Bobby. "I felt that I ought to put the thing before you. You don't think it mean of me, peaching on Sam? I just had to tell you, seeing the position we are in."

"Oh, he peached on himself," said Martia, laughing. "I knew at once when he spoke. I'll say nothing and he'll never know. He'll be himself again to-morrow."

She was right.

The skipper of the Lorna was on deck at sunrise next morning. He had remembered the water tanks. They were filled by eight, and at nine o'clock the Lorna, under her auxiliary engine, cleared the port of Genoa, and spread her wings for the Isles of Greece.

CHAPTER XV

TOWARDS HYALOS

They passed through the Straits of Messina one brilliant morning, the west wind still holding, the sea like a tray of broken sapphires, and Etna a cone of almost translucent purple against the flower-blue sky.

A nautilus fleet was going with them with sails set to the favouring wind, and away to starboard Sicilian fishing-boats putting out for the Lipari Islands dotted the sea.

Martia, alone on deck for a moment but for Bowler at the wheel, and Church and Atherfield forward, gazing from the Sicilian to the Italian shore, breathed deep, half-intoxicated with the brilliancy and beauty of it all.

Then her eyes fell on Bowler, his gaze fixed on the compass card, and the others, indifferent to their surroundings as though they were in the Thames estuary, and she remembered what Sam had said to Bobby and repeated to her, that these men cared for nothing but their own immediate interests and wants, that the great god Pan hauled alive and kicking out of the waters of Hyalos would move them scarcely more than the capture of a porpoise, that they were a crew of blind men, safe to hold their tongues when they returned home.

She came to understand how, even if Greek fishermen looking down through the water had observed the submerged town, as undoubtedly they had in the course of centuries, the sight would have moved them not at all, would have been forgotten when seen, or scarcely remembered, having nothing to do with their interests, their comfort, or their welfare.

It seemed to her that a great book could be written on the blindness of the world, and not only on the blindness of common people, but of every man towards everything unconnected with his own special desires and ambitions.

She was thinking this when Bobby's head emerged from the saloon hatch; he glanced around, seemingly as indifferent to the beauties about him as Bowler, then he called to the girl.

"Come down," said Bobby. "We've got the charts out, and I want you to have a look at them."

Sam was in the cabin in his shirt sleeves, before the table littered with charts and maps.

"Here we are," said the skipper of the Lorna, pointing to their position on the map. "We'll be into the Ionian Sea when we've passed the straits, and then it will be a straight run for the Straits of Cervi; from that it's only eighty or ninety miles to Hyalos. It's not marked on the map, it's too small, but it's on the charts; it's just about there, seventy miles or so south of Milo."

Martia looked at the map, and at the great strew of islands to the east of Greece, stretching from Eubœa to Santorin; islands of eternal summer still tinged with the light of the Golden Age.

She had read them up before leaving England, and she could tell the others things they did not know.

"Seventy miles south of Milo?" said she. "That's where the Venus came from."

"Which Venus?" asked Bobby.

"The Venus of Milo."

"Oh, that thing without arms," said Sam, putting the map aside and spreading a chart.

"Yes, that thing without arms—the most beautiful statue in the world. A peasant found it; he was pulling down a heap of stones, and there it was. All these islands, at least the big ones, must have been full of beautiful works of art once. I can't understand it. You have a civilisation capable of producing these things, and then it vanishes, and the people who come after smash them and destroy them, pull down the temple of the Venus of Milo, break all the figures of the Parthenon, and even haven't the eyes to find what we are going to find at Hyalos. The Greeks deserve to lose their art treasures."

"They are going to lose the ones at Hyalos, anyhow," said Bobby.

"No, they aren't," said Martia. "How can a man lose what he doesn't possess? Anyhow, what he doesn't deserve to possess. If a man possesses a horse and treats it badly, it's taken away from him, isn't it? It's just the same here."

"Well, I'm not bothering about the Greeks so much as the reefs," cut in Sam. "Look, here's the chart of the waters round Hyalos, and I'll bet a sovereign the soundings are all wrong. You see, they haven't bothered about the island or the bay; the place is only a rock to be avoided. But the reefs are given. Here to the north, where the bay lies, it's all reefs, overlapping; doesn't seem to be a decent passage a ship could take. Look!"

The girl sat down and examined the chart, and Bobby, watching them, forgot everything, even the expedition itself, his mind engaged again with the exasperating problem set for it by these two people.

There was something between them sufficient to make Sam fly off the handle at Genoa, and yet, in the ordinary shipboard affairs, as now, they seemed almost indifferent to one another's existence—just ordinary shipmates. And yet Sam had distinctly given him to understand that his aberration at Genoa was due to a girl who was in his mind—had as good as said that the girl was Martia.

Taking the whole business from the start, every indication pointed to the same conclusion, which was this:

Sam had once been engaged to the girl, or at all events they had been in love with each other, then Isaac Behrens had turned up and captured the affections of the lady, and the idiotic Sam had gone off in a rage and "spoiled his life," by throwing his prospects away and taking to longshore life at Poole.

What made Bobby bother about the whole business was the fact that he was in love himself.

Martia had fascinated him from the first, and the close acquaintance of shipboard life had not decreased that fascination; day by day her hold had grown upon him. Had they been on shore, leading an ordinary life, he would have declared himself at once, or even before this; but the expedition tied him. Whatever his feelings might be, it was impossible to show them till this business was complete and the work before them finished.

All the same, that night when he was alone on deck with her, with Church at the wheel and Atherfield on the look-out, something in the depths of his mind rose up and spoke.

"Did you know much of Sam before he went off and took up with the yachting business?" asked he.

"No," replied Martia; "very little."

She spoke in an ordinary tone as though Hackett was of no account at all to her, and mystified more than ever, but relieved in his mind, he said no more.

CHAPTER XVI

HYALOS

Two mornings later, as they were finishing breakfast, Sam suddenly rose from the table. His sharp ear had caught something unheard by the others, but they heard the voice of Atherfield, who was steering:

"Where away?"

And the voice of Church, who was on the look-out, faint against the wind:

"On the starboard bow."

"Land," said Sam.

They left the table and came on deck.

Away on the starboard bow, above the horizon of the blue and empty sea, a point showed clear in that crystal air, remote, like the sail of a ship dyed with Tyrian purple.

The glass resolved it into a rock, a vast rock two hundred feet in height, cleft at the summit and broadened at the base, the highest peak of an island whose low shore was vaguely indicated.

"Hyalos," said Sam, handing the glass to the girl.

Holding a stay and steadying the glass, she looked. Nothing but sea—sky line—then as she shifted the glass the great rock, lavender and purple, with its broken crest and spurs and gulleys, broke into view, leaped at her across the sea, captured her mind and imagination for ever with its desolation and loneliness.

It was less a rock than a vast monolith, a column of a single stone erected before Troy was a city or Athens a town. On it might have been written, "I saw the Persian ships pass on their way to the beach of Marathon and the Argo sailing to find the Golden Fleece. I was here before Sappho sang, and at my base lies Hyalos, a town of dreams sunk in an enchanted sea."

That was how the distant vision spoke to Martia.

Sam, taking the glass back from her, had another long look. Then he turned to the steersman.

"Keep her as she goes," said Sam. "We want to get well to the north." Then he turned to Bobby, "Get a fellow ready forward with the lead and then fetch me that chart up. No. A chart. You'll find it on top of the others in the chart locker. Bowler, get a tackle ready for lowering the boat. I'll anchor outside, if I can find decent holding ground, and take soundings with the boat. How's the glass?"

"Glass is steady, sir."

The Lorna carried two boats, a solid clinker-built four-oar for shore work and the diving business, and a collapsible dinghy.

The skipper of the Lorna, having glanced at the boat, went to the sail-room; here he had stored a lot of other things besides canvas. Before leaving Poole he had studied the whole of this affair, and worked it out to the minutest detail. The sail-room contained, amongst other things, six or eight lobster-pot buoys with ground tackle, also a croquet-set box, labelled "Dangerous, don't touch," containing dynamite charges, a small electric battery, and the wiring necessary for deep-sea blasting operations.

He brought the buoys out now and placed them on the deck. Then he turned to the chart which Bobby had given him, and, laying it on the cabin skylight, pored over it, memorising once again the lie of the reefs.

There was one good thing. In this all-but tideless sea the difference between low and high water was next to nothing. The reefs did not play hide and seek, and, as a matter of fact, the reefs north of Hyalos were frank almost to the point of frightfulness. An hour later, with Hyalos full in view, they showed themselves, faint lines of foam where the flower-blue sea broke gently to the heave of the swell, traces of purple, and over all gulls flying and calling.

The Lorna held on. The helm had been shifted, and the island lay no longer on the starboard bow but straight ahead.

On and on, the voices of the gulls growing clearer and the "Get away—get away" of the guillemots sharper against the wind, whilst Sam, who had swarmed up to the cross-trees, swept the reef lines from east to west with his gaze.

It was easy to understand why the bay of Hyalos, with its hidden treasures, had lain sealed through all the years. Only in one place, towards the westward end of the shark-toothed reefs, was there an opening through them, a blue line of clean water, too narrow for a full-sized ship to pass but sufficiently broad for a vessel of small tonnage.

Strangely enough, the fact that this was the only way of entrance simplified the whole problem enormously. Since there was only one way in, and that way had evidently been taken by Isaac Behrens' boat, it stood to reason that it must be a fairway: it must, from the very fact of its narrowness, be free of danger from rocks—as Behrens' boat would have had no room for manœuvring—and permanently free since there were no tides.

Sam came down at a run. His whole plans were changed. He ordered the buoys and tackle to be put back in the sail-room, the canvas to be taken in and stowed, and the auxiliary engine started. Then he went aloft again to conn the ship.

The reefs drew closer: the whisper of them came now through the faint thud of the little engine, and the challenging gulls, like snowflakes against the blue sky, flew around and above the Lorna shouting, calling, passing away on the wind only to return, whilst the gently heaving swell broke now on the rocks to port and starboard, and the narrow line of blue water ahead seemed to grow narrower.

"We'll never get through," murmured Martia, half to herself, half to Bobby, as they stood in the bow with the reefs a biscuit toss on either side. "Ouch!" A heave of the swell had taken charge of them so that for a moment the steerage way seemed lost. She shut her eyes.

"We're through!" said Bobby.

She opened them. Only fifty yards of passage separated them from clear water, into which they passed, gliding with engine shut off over the surface of a vast bay. A bay two miles long by a mile wide, a bay closed to the sea by the reefs, and whose water changed in colour from aquamarine beneath the keel to emerald, and from emerald to the blue of sapphire.

The shore showed nothing but boulders, sand patches, and desolation, above which the great hill of rock stood, gaunt and seamed with gullies, sharp-cut against the cloudless sky. They were at the western end, and the two-mile stretch of water to east of them seemed infinite in extent, whilst beyond the reefs through which they had passed the outer sea lay hard and brilliant as a gem.

As the anchor fell and the Lorna rode to her moorings, Bobby looked overside. Nothing. Nothing but rock and sand patches showing clear as through air in the diamond-bright water. He had forgotten for a moment that the submerged town lay, unless its existence was a dream of Isaac Behrens', in the eastern side of the bay. Martia reminded him of this fact. As for Sam, he had not even glanced over. He was busy snugging things down and as indifferent to his surroundings as though he had been in Poole Harbour.

When everything was right, he ordered the boat to be got over. They crowded into her immediately, and, with Bowler and Church at the oars, started.

"It'll be down to the east side of the bay," said Sam, "if it's here at all."

He had taken the yoke lines and was steering.

"Here at all?" said the girl. "Of course it's here." His words, as though casting a doubt upon Isaac's story, wounded her. "What makes you think it's not?"

"Oh, I don't know," said he. "It's only that, in my experience, things once they're sunk on the sea-floor aren't found again as a rule. Look at Tobermory. Of course, there are no tides here, but it's in the earthquake zone, and one never knows."

Sam was right enough. Once the sea has grasped a thing, be it ship or treasure, she holds it, hides it, defends it by all sorts of trickery. Very, very rarely is anything recovered from her clutch once it has been held for even a few years. But the case of Hyalos was different from all other cases. It had been seen and mapped recently, and it was unlikely that any earthquake disturbance would have destroyed or covered it from sight since then.

Bobby said this. Then, leaning over the starboard gunnel whilst the girl bent over the port side, they watched, gazing deep down through the clear, bright water, the floor of the bay shimmering up at them through the undulations caused by the oars.

Nothing. Sand and rock, fish fleeting here and there, the long red ribbon-fish of the Mediterranean and Ægean, a bass followed by its black shadow on the floor, a silver shoal of sardines, a globe jellyfish and a number of cup-shape jellyfish opening and closing like umbrellas as they pumped their way along—nothing more.

The leisurely creak of the oars sounded against the far crying of the gulls; the sun struck hot on their backs as they leant watching for that which never showed itself. And now, as minute after minute passed, and though they had not quite reached the eastern zone of the bay, there came to Bobby that horrible clutch at the throat known to the man who sees before him defeat, the man who sees the horse that carries his fortune falling back in the race.

Had Isaac Behrens suffered from illusion? Had the floor of the bay altered? Had they come to the wrong place, and was this not Hyalos, after all?

He did not dare to ask the questions aloud. Confused and dizzy with the heat of the sun he continued gazing.

Nothing. Though they rowed for ever and gazed for ever, nothing would they see but the rocks and the sand and the fish; all their work was undone and their labours in vain.

Then suddenly a great white mass shot up waveringly, as though to strike the keel of the boat, and Bobby, expecting the crash, yelled to the rowers to stop.

There was no crash: the thing was fathoms under; and now, as the boat floated placidly, gazing over they saw shimmering up at them not rock and sand but what seemed the interior of a vast white shallow bowl over the rim of which they had passed.

It was the theatre of Hyalos.

A theatre once open to the sky and breezes, once filled with people who had vanished from the earth before Christ was born.

Broken and ruined in places, the tiers of marble seats still showed, in parts almost perfect.

Sam, who had brought the map of Isaac Behrens with him, spread it on his knee.

"Yes," said he, quite unmoved by what was lying beneath them. "That's the theatre all right, and it's lying just where it should be by the map—it's the most westerly building of the town. Here's a note that says: 'It being possibly beyond the city wall, of which there is no distinct trace.'"

Martia scarcely heard him. She was fascinated; she could have gazed for ever. In that moment she caught the spirit and inner meaning of this lost town with a vividness that never came again; this town once filled with life and beauty and laughter, set now in the crystal silence of the sea. And it had been there before she was born, before the Victorian age and the age of Elizabeth; before the Norman Conquest; and when Romulus was making his wall which was to expand and ring the mighty Roman Empire, it had been there, just as now, preserved in the clear and tideless water of this bay, watched only by the seagulls.

Then the theatre began to fall away and vanish behind them, the boat was moving slowly forward under the direction of Sam, and now beneath them lay ruins. Heaps of marble blocks lying as though cast about by a giant, and broken columns, suggestive of some great building gone to ruin, glimmered up at them and passed astern, giving place to a level floor where there was nothing.

"This would be the agora," said Sam, referring to the map, on which Isaac Behrens had marked not only the streets and places but their names—names of his own invention except in the cases of the theatre and the agora, or market-place. "Hermes Street opens on the right of it, the Street of Victory on the left of it. Let's have a look at Victory Street first. Go slow, Bowler."

He steered to the left, and the agora passed under them, the boat's shadow flitting across it as the shadows of gulls and swallows had flittered in ancient days. They could see the ruts in its floor made by wheeled traffic, and now to the right the standing columns of what had once been a roofed colonnade.

Then again, as in the case of their approach to the theatre, something rose through the water ahead of them as if to hit the keel.

Houses. Houses closing this, the north, side of the market-place; houses whose walls rose to within a fathom and a half of the surface.

The old Greek house had no roof; it was, in fact, a courtyard surrounded by rooms and open to the sky, a covered colonnade running round the tiny courtyard.

Looking down now as the boat slowly drifted, they could see the colonnade roofs within a few yards of the keel, and the square courtyards whose tessellated floors showed vague patterns through the waving water. Spaces lay between these houses of a vanished world, spaces that had once been dark and narrow lanes; broader spaces that had once, perhaps, been gardens; and all lay here, shy, secret, hidden, yet suddenly revealed.

It was like opening the hand of Time and looking at things never intended to be seen by living eyes.

They had drifted over the houses on the right-hand side of Victory Street, and now, with a stroke of an oar and a shift of the helm, they came upon the street itself. Broad almost as Regent Street it lay beneath them, the houses on the left vaguely visible, the houses they had just passed over close and clear to sight.

Actually in this gin-bright water, as in some Pacific lagoon, things at a depth of six or seven fathoms were more clearly visible than they would have been if seen through air. As in the agora, here, too, the wheel-ruts of long-forgotten traffic showed, and here and there in front of a house a little cone-shaped column lay, the Apollo of the street, once the guardian of the house to which it belonged.

Sam ordered the oars in and let the boat drift. There was a gentle current here, setting north in the direction in which the street ran, and Bowler and his mate, released from their work, condescended to look over and take an interest in what was going on.

"You've never seen houses and a street like that before, Bowler," said the girl, flushed with excitement and looking up at the other.

"No, miss; I don't remember that I have," replied the salt: "It's the clear water shows 'em up. There's a place like this off Suffolk, where there's a church an' all sunk close off shore, but you can't see nuthin', the water bein' thick."

"Hoi! Look at that fish!" cried the other fellow. "Ain't it a big 'un?"

An enormous bream, stolen out of some back alley, had caught the sun; then, frightened by the boat shadow, with a twist of its tail it turned and vanished.

The boat floated on.

Then glimmering up at them from the street centre something white showed, a small mound of marble blocks—no, a group of statuary gone to ruin. It was their first find; up to this they had seen nothing of man's handiwork with the exception of the theatre and the houses, the street, and the broken Apollos of the street. This was different.

The oars were got out to stop the drift, and, gazing over, they absorbed the vision beneath them.

When Hyalos, with a great shudder, had sunk eight fathoms below the sea level, here in the Street of Hermes a wonderful group of statuary must have fallen, shaken at the base. Close to the little heap of white ruins lay a marble chariot-wheel and a horse's head; a headless, marble-winged woman with one wing broken lay near the wheel. The appealing charm of these things was their small size.

The winged woman could not have been more than four feet in height when standing in her chariot, the horses not so large as Shetland ponies, the wheel as it lay seemed not more than thrice the diameter of a dinner plate. Splendour of size had evidently no charm for the people of Hyalos.

The statuary had represented a Victory, standing in her chariot driving her horses across the face of the world. How lovely the thing must have been in its delicate minuteness when complete might be guessed by the little horse's head showing in profile from the floor of the street, a head beautiful as that of the horse of the Moon that once graced the eastern pediment of the Parthenon.

That mutilated woman and that severed head were worth, alone, all the trouble of the expedition. That little horse's head of marble filled with fire, what would it not "fetch" in a world where Art is not, only art dealers?

The Victory had fallen prone, the face could not be seen.

"Can we get them up?" asked Martia, appealing to Sam. "Now—at once? I want to hold that little wheel in my hands. Oh, the poor, lovely broken things!"

Her voice failed, her eyes were filled with tears. Hyalos had spoken to her through this little shattered dream, more appealing than any work of grandeur and magnificence.

"Yes," said the skipper. "We can get them up easy enough, but not now. I'll have to bring the ship right over here and rig a tackle. You can't do that in a minute. We've got the location, and it's easy to pick it up again. Let's go on and see what else there is."

The rowers, at his direction, put the boat forward with a stroke of the oars, and then let her drift, correcting her course now and then whilst the Street of Victory passed beneath them, showing now a fallen column that had once stood proudly in its centre, and now a Hermes of the street that had fallen from some house front, and now a grim fact.

The street had suddenly grown narrow, the houses dwarfed—almost hovels.

They had come upon poverty.

Hyalos, old as history itself, had its slums just as London has its slums, and New York. It seemed to say to the gazers: "Look, here is the evil that runs through all cities, in all times; so it was in ancient Athens, so it ever will be."

Martia, the most sensitive of the boat's crew, ceased gazing down into the water and turned her eyes across the sunlit bay to where the Lorna Doone was riding at her anchor.

A curious feeling of depression had now come over her. It had been stealing upon her mind almost imperceptibly from the moment when, looking down, she had seen the wheel-tracks on the pavement of the market-place. Now, raising her eyes to the blue and sunlit bay, the living, laughing gulls, the perfect sky, the town beneath the keel seemed almost terrible, almost sinister, almost evil. This feeling in its acutest form lasted only a moment; it passed, but there still remained the vague depression.

"I don't know how you feel," said she to the others, "but I'd like to go back to the Lorna for a while and rest. We've succeeded, haven't we? Everything is as it should be? But it's a bit overpowering at first. It wants getting used to."

"I was just feeling the same," said Bobby. "I want to sit down and think and smoke a pipe over it."

"Right!" said Sam.

He altered the helm, and, the rowers taking to their oars, the boat turned and headed due west across the sparkling water. The skipper of the Lorna Doone, without admitting it, had seen enough for the present moment. The thing wanted getting used to, and he was silent as he steered, an unlit pipe between his teeth.

It was Bowler who spoke. He was rowing stern oar.

"How long do you think them old houses has been sunk, sir?" asked Bowler, addressing Bobby.

"Ages ago," said Bobby, waking from a reverie. "Ages before William the Conqueror landed in England, and that's a good many years, Bowler."

"Would it be a hundred, sir?"

"Yes, and more than that."

Bowler, satisfied in his mind on this point, spoke no more, and the boat creaked on reaching the Lorna, where they scrambled on board.

Later, getting on for sundown, Bobby, who had come on deck, leaving the others resting below, heard voices from the fo'c'sle. The whole crew, Glastonbury included, were in the fo'c'sle smoking and talking. A furious discussion was going on, presumably on the wonders of Hyalos, and Bobby, anxious to hear what was said, paused by the fo'c'sle hatch to listen. Came Church's voice:

"It weren't, it weren't him; it was Black Jack. They wouldn't serve him no more at the Anchor, and he comes to the Bull. The girl drew him a glass, but, seein' him rockin' like a ninepin, took it back. Up he gets a knee on the bar, and over he'd 'a' been only for Benson, the landlord, who was sittin' talkin' to Hammond. Benson caught him by the foot and brought him down all standing and chucked him out, and that was the beginnin' of the whole business. Swore Benson had kicked him in the innards, he did, and got his licence took from him."

"That's so," came the deep voice of Bowler. "I was there."

So much for the wonders of Hyalos.

CHAPTER XVII

THE HOUSES

They dined at six o'clock, and after dinner they sat on deck in the gathering dark making plans for the morrow.

The map of Hyalos, which they had studied so often, was impressed on their minds so that they had no need to refer to it. Roughly, and for their purpose, the town of Hyalos might be described as framed around three streets and the market-place or agora. The theatre, presumably outside the walls, did not come into the plan of the town.

The three streets, as named by Isaac Behrens, were the Street of the Winged Victory running north, the Street of the Winds running east, and the Street of Hermes running south.

The town was roughly half-moon shaped, the curve to the east.

Behrens, who must have carried a photographic camera in his brain, had drawn his map with the most loving minuteness, showing all sorts of little by-streets intersecting the main avenues. Amongst the notes on the back of the map was one which read: "Search mainly houses adjoining agora end Victory, Hermes, St. of Winds."

That evidently referred to treasure.

It was obvious enough that whatever works of art Hyalos might disclose would be found in the better-class houses adjoining the big streets. But why did Isaac specify the agora end of the streets? What antiquarian or art-lover instinct prompted him? Who could tell?

"To-morrow," said Sam, "I'll bring the ship along and we'll anchor right over one of those houses. The drift is nothing. I won't use the anchor—just a couple of ballast pigs at the end of the cable will hold her steady—and we can work the air pump from deck. She has a low freeboard, and will be just as handy to use as the boat and a lot more comfortable."

"Glastonbury knows what to look for," said Bobby. "I've given him a course of instruction. Pretty simple, too. Everything moveable he can lay hands on, and especially anything in the way of figures or heads made of stone. There's no use in talking of objects of art to Glastonbury, but he understands the meaning of figures."

"It's nothing of a job as far as he's concerned," said Sam. "It's only a six- or seven-fathom drop into one of those courtyards, and the Sooloo pearl divers will do seventeen fathoms without a diving dress."

"Tell me," said Martia. "I only know about diving that the diver has an air-pipe to give him air which has to be pumped to him. Well, suppose we lower Glastonbury down into one of those courtyards."

"We don't lower him," said Sam—"he goes down himself."

"Well, he's in the courtyard, then he goes under the colonnade and into the room of the house. Isn't there danger of the air-pipe getting tangled round something, or bent, so's he can't breathe?"

"Not with a diver who knows his work," replied the other. "Those houses are nothing to Glastonbury. Why, he's often gone down to a sunk ship and into it, into the cabins and places, and that off the English coast, where the water's as thick as pea-soup compared with the water here."

"How will he see when he gets into the house?"

"Oh, he's got an electric torch. We lower a net-bag with a sinker in it—I've got two in the sail-room. He puts what he finds in the bag and we haul it up, so he hasn't to come to the surface every time he finds anything."

"And how does he come up when he's finished. Do we pull him?"

"No, he comes up a rope; or if he's in a hurry he just shuts the escape valve in his helmet and the air balloons out his dress, and he rises like a bubble."

Martia sat for a moment in silence. The moon was just lifting, a great silver moon lighting the bay and the sea beyond, silver-faced yet rosy-fingered, for where she touched the bunt of a badly stowed sail and the white planking of the deck the light showed in it a tinge of rose.

"There's one thing I haven't thought of till now," said she. "Are we doing right in keeping this place a secret from the world?"

"How do you mean?" said Bobby.

"I mean this is one of the wonders of the world, like Pompeii. It is a Pompeii, covered with water instead of lava. Well, oughtn't we to talk about it?"

"Why?" asked Bobby.

"So that people may see it; archæologists and people."

"I don't see why we should make ourselves advertising agents for this place," said Sam. "Anyhow, I don't see there's any 'ought' in it. You've come out here to scrape up statues and things for old Behrens, and from what you say the Greek Government might lay claim to them if they knew. No, keep it dark. Suppose you did tell? Even if the Greeks didn't make trouble, what good would it do? You'd have shiploads of beastly tourists coming here, that would be all, and fusty old archæologists. The world wouldn't be a bit better for it."

"Anyhow," said Bobby, "it's always up to us to give information about the place. We could do it in a year or so, anonymously: write a letter to the Times or something of that sort."

They sat whilst the moon rose higher, lighting the island, the bay and the reefs; the girl trying to fancy shiploads of tourists breaking into this beautiful desolation—tourists come to "do" Hyalos. Her mind refused the idea. The city that time had hidden so carefully appealed against it.

"Take what you will of my treasures," it said, "but spare me that."

They were up an hour after sunrise next morning, and, after tea and biscuits served on deck by Bowler, they started to get the anchor up and the auxiliary engine going.

It was good to be alive. A tepid sea-scented breeze ruffled the bay and brought a faint whisper from the reef where the foam traces showed in lines of gold. Gulls filled the air and followed them as the Lorna, with the anchor up and the engine going, turned to the helm and glided eastward, whilst the hands forward were getting ready the ballast pigs to serve as anchors and Glastonbury, on his knees, was going over the diving gear which he had spread out on deck. The great brass helmet, the lead sinkers, the boots so heavy that they were difficult to lift, the air tube and signal line, the electric torch—all and each of these he was inspecting with the care of a man whose life depended on perfection of detail. The pump had been rigged on the starboard side, and, having finished with the gear, he turned to the pump, overhauling it, whilst Sam, forward and leaning over the side, was giving directions to the steersman.

They passed over the theatre, then the market-place showed its wide surface glimmering up through the breezed water.

Sam ordered the engine to be shut off, and the Lorna, gliding with the way on her, stole towards the advancing houses, whose walls showed now like a submarine cloud, now more solidly.

"Ready with the anchor there!" cried Sam.

Martia, standing by the steersman, watched breathlessly whilst the fellows handling the two great ballast pigs attached to the cable got ready to heave them over.

Then came the voice: "Port—steady so." And a moment later: "Damn, we've overrun it! Put her back a stroke or two."

The little propeller flopped and was still. The Lorna receded slightly, ceased to move, and then began gently to drift.

"Over with the anchor!" The order came sharp as a pistol-shot; and on the splash Martia came forward and looked down.

Sam had manœuvred the Lorna right over the courtyard of a house on whose tessellated pavement the ballast pigs were resting: seven and a half fathoms of cable were out and the bubbles were still coming up.

"Will she hold?" asked Glastonbury, who was leaning over beside Sam.

"Sure," said Sam. "But let her swing first. That weight will hold her with this move of current, but we'll soon see."

The Lorna was shifting her position, coming round gently bow on to the almost imperceptible drift. Then she hung motionless to the tautened cable.

"She holds all right," said Sam. "But, if you like, I'll put another anchor out."

"No, I reckon that's enough," said the diver. "If she did drift them pigs would catch up against the roof there"—he pointed to the roof of the colonnade. "House you call it. Why, it's more like a darn cistern without a lid."

"Well, that's how they built in the old days," replied the other. "And now, you'll remember all I told you. Under that roof-place you'll find the rooms. Take your time over it and don't be in a hurry. Nab anything you can find and fix in your head all the details."

Glastonbury turned from the side, and then, indifferently, as though he were going down in Poole Harbour to free an anchor-chain or fix a pile, he began to dress.

Martia watched. It was the most exciting moment of her life. What might happen to him? What might he not find? No treasure hunt could have more thrills in it than this search—not for base gold but for that which no gold could create. This was the moment of moments towards which all their labours had tended.

She watched him getting into the canvas suit, and the boots weighing sixteen pounds each being put on his feet, and the lead sinkers on his shoulders; the great helmet with the front glass open put on his head and fixed, with the air-tube attached.

Church and Bowler were at the pump, and they set it going.

"Right," said Glastonbury; and the helmet was closed to a hiss of air from the escape valve.

Then she watched as slowly, with the movements of a paralysed elephant, he turned to the side, got over, and began to crawl down the ladder. Oh, if anything should happen to the pump, to the air-tube! She had never seen a diver going down before, and the thought clutched her so that for a moment she did not dare to look. When she did, leaning over beside Bobby, she saw on the tessellated pavement beneath her the diver like a horned monster, a long stream of bubbles ascending from his head. He was standing erect and seemed looking round him, then, followed by the pipe and the signal line, he vanished beneath the colonnade roof.

The clanking of the pump, slow and rhythmical, filled the air, answering to the voices of the far-off gulls.

"Now over with the net," said Sam; and the net-bag with its sinker went down, resting on the courtyard floor. As it did so a fish, blue and grey, and big as a twenty-pound salmon, darted from the shadows where the diver had vanished. He had frightened it out, and it fled hither and thither, scared by the ship above, and disappearing at last under the colonnade roof at the northern end.

A minute passed, two, three, four—then the figure in the helmet, the air bubbles gaily spraying upwards from it, reappeared; he was carrying something.

He bent by the net-bag, then rose and passed off again into the shadows. Bobby and Sam between them hauled up the bag, dripping from the sea.

A Greek vase showed through the meshes of the bag, a vase of red glazed earthenware, exquisite in shape and pictured in black with men reclining at a banquet and girl flute-players playing double flutes. It stood nearly eighteen inches in height in the light of the sun that it had not seen for two thousand years, and Martia, kneeling before it, could not speak. She lifted it in both her hands to pour the water from it, when out tumbled a little figure that seemed made of crystal: a winged Eros, fat as a Roman Cupid, standing on its hands on a base of crystal, its feet in the air, turning a somersault. Some child's toy, possibly, dropped into the jar by the child or by its mother for safe keeping. Bowler, who had turned his head for a moment as he worked at the pump, saw this thing as it stood on the deck where Martia had placed it beside the jar, and laughed—a single laugh like a knock on a board. Then, without a word, he went on with his pumping. The humour of the thing had kept through all the centuries, and the artist had not worked in vain.

Meanwhile, Sam had flung the net over again, but it did not come up again immediately. Glastonbury, going and coming, was collecting things in a dump to save time. Then they began to come up so rapidly that the receivers had only time to disengage them from the bag.

Vases like the first; shallow drinking-cups, all exquisite in form, unbroken, and pictured with feasts, battles, and ceremonies, flute-girls and girls at play, men sacrificing animals on altars, and men putting on armour for the fight; a bracelet of metal, heavy as gold; a cup of black metal, possibly silver, and carved with figures; a sea nymph of marble astride a marble dolphin, the whole not over ten inches high; and a disc thrower in marble like the discobolus of the Museum, except in size, for the plinth was not bigger than a soup plate.

All these things the collector of antiques, seven fathoms below the keel, sent up to be received dripping from the sea; and all these things, to the value of thousands of pounds, stood on the deck-planking in the burning sun, of little interest to any but Martia and Bobby. Sam had talked of a crew of blind men; in reality he was nearly as blind as his crew, as far as these things were concerned.

Then Glastonbury came up, reporting a clean sweep. With helmet off and cigarette in his lips he gave a sketch of the rooms he had entered.

"More like cells in a police-station than decent rooms," said Glastonbury—"all but the big room I got them things from," pointing to the statuary.

It seemed that the largest of the jars had come from the big room, and the rest, from a room that might have been a kitchen. There were stone benches but no trace of any wooden furniture: that would no doubt have been eaten by the sea ages ago.

Well, there on the deck was the result of the sacking of a single house, and if all the other houses in the better-class streets of Hyalos were to give up an equal amount of treasure, it seemed to Sam that they would want the Mauretania to bring the stuff back to England. He said so.

The remark did not trouble Martia. Her mind was already in trouble. They had clean forgotten packing material. Her woman's instinct for crockery had brought this fact suddenly into her mind.

Those lovely jars, which she would not have allowed a servant to handle! How were they to be carried unbroken to England? The statuary was all right: it would stand rough usage—but the jars? Where was the straw and where were the hampers that ought to have been provided?

She asked all this kneeling on the deck beside her treasures.

"We can shove them in the sail-room," said Sam. "Put them close enough together and they won't carry away."

"Shove them in the sail-room? Don't you know that each one ought to be wrapped round with straw and then straw put between them? It is my fault. I ought to have thought of this. But then how was I to know? I never imagined finding things so fragile as these."

"Beg your pardon, miss, but you are talkin' about straw," said Bowler.

"Yes."

"Well, there's enough grass growin' ashore to make all the straw you want. It's all there bar the cutting."

"We've nothing to cut it with," said Bobby.

"There are knives enough, and we can sharpen them," replied Sam. "We'll start in to-morrow, and when we've cut enough we'll leave it to dry in the sun. Meanwhile, you can stow those things in the sail-room; there's no roll or pitch here to harm them."

They went below to get some food, and two hours later, the anchor being got in, Sam jockeyed the Lorna over the courtyard of the next house.

Glastonbury was down five minutes. He sent nothing up; he came up himself with the report that the place was stripped. Stone couches, a chair of marble too heavy to be moved, and a few scraps of corroded metal were all the things he found.

A depressing result after the first glorious discoveries.

The inhabitants had either removed their things or had cared nothing for objects of art and adornment.

It was Sam who cheered the others up as they sat in the cabin that night discussing matters.

"There's no use in thinking on a job like this," said Sam. "We've begun well, anyhow. I don't care whether these Hyalites cleared out before the sea took them or were swallowed whole. It stands to reason that one house can't be full of things and all the rest empty. We've just got to go ahead and go slow and methodical, and to-morrow there'll be no diving. We'll land and cut grass—and pray for fine weather."

CHAPTER XVIII

A TERRIBLE DANGER

Next day whilst the hands were cutting grass, Bobby, who had come on shore with them and who was not wanted for the work, started on an expedition of his own.

Hyalos from far at sea, to the west looks like a single rock washed by the waves, closer and to the north you can see a high down by the peak, and the beach seems just a strip of foreshore, but when you land it is different, the beach is broad and the high lands are broken showing two cañons on this the northern side.

You can in fact cross the island from north to south by taking either of these cañons which run east and west of the main peak.

Lestrange, having helped to pull the boat up, and whilst the hands were getting to work, took his seat on a rock for a moment to look at the view. The island looked nothing from the sea, but the sea seen from the island was a vision of pure enchantment. It is like that amongst the Greek islands. One world when you are on board ship, another world when you land.

The sea brimming in to the beach, the diamond-clear green-blue sea, showed scarcely a ruffle; smooth as a satin sheet, under-blown by a gentle wind it raised and let fall the Lorna mirroring her and passing on to break on the beach in foot-high waves.

Then, from the cliff foot and from the cañons cutting inland a faint fragrance filled the air, the warm smell of lavender and thyme and all sorts of low-growing herbs trodden on by the sun, a bouquet sweet as that of the Corsican maquis, the incense of a hundred humble plants that in some subtle way brought back the past. It was strange to think that when Hyalos was a town standing in the sunlight and not in the sea those plants were as fragrant as to-day, the thyme just as curious in its speech and the wild lavender just as sweet. Strange, were they not denizens of a world where flesh is more enduring than the Alps and the daisy a million years older than the pyramid, and where a song may outlive a people and a story a civilisation.

Here on the north beach of Hyalos or over at Naxos or Milo, if you get by yourself with no companions but the sun and blue sea and the sky above and the perfume of the shore, a trireme coming in with the black bearded rowers keeping time to a flute would be perfectly in the picture. Nothing has altered since the change in the land level that has submerged a city and the attrition that has made the peak a shade less high than the peak observed by the Argo or the wool ships of Amorgos.

Leaving the beach and the grass cutters at their work, Lestrange came up the eastern-most cañon treading the sweet herbs under foot and avoiding the vast rocks that the course of ages had tumbled from the peak and higher lands.

A turn of the valley brought him to a place where it widened out and spread into a vast down, like the downlands above Freshwater in the Isle of Wight. It was steep climbing, yet easy compared with the stair-steep cañon, and worth the trouble, for here on the shoulder when he reached it, he found himself in a new world, a world of silence and high clear air, where the turf and thyme bushes spread to the edge of the southern cliffs and beyond the cliff edge the southern sea sailless to the remote and sharp-cut sea-line. The down sweep had only one break in it, a broad and cup-like hollow where, sheltered from the sea winds, grew a few distorted trees; near the trees something was moving—a wild goat cropping the herbage.

He sat down amidst the thyme to rest and smoke a pipe. It was delightful, just as if a door had been closed shutting out the ship and Sam and the voyage, and the hunt after hidden treasure, ambition, the past, everything he had ever known—even Martia. That was the strange thing. He never once thought of her; in this feeling of release that had come upon him there was no place for the past.

The cry of a bird from far above made him turn as he lay on his elbow and look up. An eagle that had left its eerie on the peak was wheeling in the blue, it passed away and he turned again on his side watching the goat that had left the zone of the trees and was browsing now on the grass beyond. Something lying on the turf in the centre of the depression caught his eye, it looked at first like a small tree trunk, ash-coloured and fluted—then he saw that it was part of a broken pillar. Some old temple had once been there no doubt, of which it was the sole remains.

The warmth of the sun had brought out more than the perfume of the herbage, the tiny song of innumerable insects filled the air; he only noticed it now when resting and close to the earth; occasionally the chanting of gulls came from the southern cliffs, sounds that had ringed and filled this place for ages and ages, sharing to-day in the terrible antiquity of the grass, of the thyme bushes and the hidden wild hyacinth bulbs that later would flower in the face of Spring with a shameless pretence of newness.

He was, perhaps, the first man to visit that spot since—when? The reef-strewn sea that guarded Hyalos alone could tell, and one might have fancied that all those vague scents and tiny sounds of nature so long unsampled by man had gained potency by reason of man's abstention from them. They were of the essence and nature of slumber, a drug in the air that gathered force till presently, turning from his side to his back and with his hat over his eyes, he fell asleep.

He was awakened by a hand on his shoulder; someone was shaking him and calling on him to wake up. It was Sam.

Sam had seen him go up the cañon and had come to look for him and fetch him. It was dinner time; he must have been asleep for hours.

"Wake up, you old fool," said Sam, "going to sleep in the sun like that!"

The sleeper roused himself, propped himself on his elbow and stared at the other. Then he yawned, rubbed his eyes and sat up.

Sam had wakened him from a most delightful dream; he could not remember a single detail of it, yet the after-taste was heavenly.

It seemed to him that he had been with a number of people who had been leading him to some place more beautiful than earth, that he had almost clasped an impossible happiness, the rays of which still clung to him.

"Here's your pipe and hat," said Sam. "I found them away over there—What you want fooling about and going to sleep in the sun without a hat for?"

Bobby, fully awake now, saw that he was not in the place where he had fallen asleep. He must have got up in his sleep and crossed the depression in the ground and lain down again here—led, perhaps, by those delightful people of his dream. It was well that they had led him no further for the cliff edge was only a few yards away.

"I must have been doing a sleep walk," said Bobby, quite unconcerned, "sit down a moment, there's no hurry—What you say? Rot, there was no danger. It's not the first time I've done it."

"I know," said Sam, who remembered this peculiarity of the other in Oxford days, "but it's been darned near the last time. This stuff is slippery and you stopped just where it begins to shelve. Get up, you old fool, and come on. I want my dinner."

He got him up at last, and they recrossed the hollow and got back to the beach where the men who had knocked off work for dinner were seated about with the grass they had cut that morning lying in a pile near the boat landing place.

After dinner this stuff had to be dealt with. It would have been easy enough to get it into the boat in armfuls, but the real problem was how to get it from the boat on the Lorna. It would have to be lifted. They solved the problem by making it into bundles, this took time—it took them till four o'clock, when by common consent they knocked off work for the day.

It was curious how this alien business had tired the hands and put them out of temper, even Bowler the proposer of it was short in manner and Sam was not too sweet about it.

The skipper of the Lorna, though he had fallen in with Bowler's suggestion, before the accomplished fact resented his ship being turned into a hay barge; that the hay was to be used to pack antiques, not to feed horses, was a fact that made no difference to him—he objected to the hay. Sailors are queer things, especially small-yacht sailors, and at supper when the question was touched on he refused to take it as a joke.

"I'm sure I don't know what is wrong with the place," said Martia. "You're all come back in such a bad temper—all except you," she finished, turning to Bobby.

"No reason to," said Sam. "He's had the whole morning off snoozing on top of that blessed downs...."

"It was such a relief to get rid of you," replied the other. "It's a wonder I didn't stick there."

"You'd have stuck there right enough," grumbled Sam, "if you'd tumbled over that cliff." Then lighting his pipe, off he went on deck, leaving the others to finish their meal.

"What cliff?" asked Martia.

"Oh, Sam's an idiot," replied Bobby, "there wasn't any danger. I climbed up to the top there and went to sleep on the grass, and I must have got up and walked a bit in my sleep—I've done it before, and I expect it was finding myself on land and able to use my legs that made me do it. You must come up there to-morrow and see that place, it's just like the Sussex downs when you get there."

"The Sussex downs?"

"Yes, you'd never believe it from here, the land goes rolling away to the cliffs on the south side and there are wild goats and there's a temple."

"A temple?"

Bobby paused for a moment. "No, what was I saying, a temple, there's just a bit of an old pillar lying on the ground—I remember now, I dreamt something about a temple being there, I suppose it was the sight of that pillar started the idea in my mind. I had a most awfully jolly dream. I can't remember a bit of it except that temple which has just cropped up in my mind." He paused and fell into a frowning reverie as though trying to recapture other parts of that jolly dream and failing.

"No, it's gone—clean."

"Maybe," said Martia, "you saw what once had been there."

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, I don't know—things leave photographs of themselves, at least I believe they do. I was told some time ago by a person who said the story was absolutely true, that an old farmer was coming home one night over the downs somewhere on the south coast, where there had been a Roman camp. When he got home he said he had seen the funniest sight on the way—a race between a lot of milk carts."

"Milk carts?"

"That's what he said. What he did see without any doubt was a chariot race."

"A chariot race?"

"What else could it have been? A Roman chariot would at once recall a milk-cart to a farmer's mind."

"But surely," said Bobby, "you don't believe that nonsense?"

"Why not? We know very little about this world and its possibilities—and now if you have done, I'll clear up. Yes, I'll go and see that place with you, to-morrow. I'd love to."

CHAPTER XIX

ONE OF THE DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE

Next morning broke gorgeous and absolutely windless, the sea like a mirror, and Sam grumbling that they had to put in another day over the grass.

Martia, who never let pleasure stand in front of business, had so much to do on board, that she could not get ashore before ten. She had not only to tidy up things and put the cabin to rights, but also to pack food for the working party.

Bobby rowed her off, and having beached the boat with the help of Bowler, he led her along to the opening of the cañon he had ascended yesterday.

Sam did not bother them. He was on board writing up his log.

The air was hot in the cañon, the atmosphere even out in the Lorna was many degrees hotter than yesterday, the wind having withdrawn for the last twenty-four hours seemed to have made way for a momentary summer.

When they reached the place where the cañon fanned out and the downs lay before them, Martia paused to rest for a moment. She was tired. Nothing tires one more than sudden change in the temperature like this, especially coming after weeks of invigorating sea breezes.

"Sure you're up for the climb?" asked Bobby. "Or would you sooner go back? We can come another day."

"No thanks," replied Martia. "I'm all right."

They took the rise at a slant and with intervals for rest, and when they arrived on the shoulder of the down, the girl stood for a moment looking around her. Then she glanced up at the peak. The eagle had left his eerie and was circling in the blue just as he had circled yesterday. His sharp cry came through the crystal clear air; then he passed away and vanished towards the eastern-most side of the peak, and the silence resumed itself. The silence which yet held so many sounds, the faint murmur and hum of insects, the vaguest murmur of the sea, less sounds than indications of what might be hidden in the way of sounds in that silence old as the peak or Hyalos itself.

"This is the strangest, queerest place," said Martia, half laughing and turning her head this way and that as though she were listening or looking for something. "You'd never expect a bit of country like this up here, it's almost English."

"Yes, I told you," said Bobby. "It's like the downs."

"'Where the wild bee makes honey

And the thyme

Is sweet as when the gods of old were young,'"

murmured Martia.

"Yes, it's something like that," said Bobby, who had caught the words. "Makes you feel lonely, doesn't it?"

He looked up. The eagle had returned to the sky and was circling above them at a great height. He seemed climbing a spiral staircase in the air, and they sat down to watch him, leaning on their elbows and looking up till reaching a certain height he struck off seaward and to the north-west.

"I wonder where he is going to?" said the girl.

"If he goes far enough on that course he'll reach Milo," replied the other. "I expect he's making for there, it's not so very far in a straight line."

It was the first time they had been alone together since leaving England, and Bobby who had always lots to say on board ship found himself without conversation now.

The fact of the matter was he wanted to say a lot of things to Martia but couldn't. Much as he was beginning to care for her, the expedition stood first, it was a serious business that had to be finished and done with before personal considerations were to be thought of. He did not know in the least how her feelings stood towards him, and to risk a refusal or a rebuff that might make the position on board impossible, was not to be thought of.

"Where was the place by the cliffs that you were talking about?" asked Martia, waking from a moment of reverie during which she seemed to have forgotten the eagle and its destination and even Bobby.

"Which place?"

"The place by the cliffs where you went and lay down."

"Oh, right over there." He pointed to the grass line where the southern slope began. "I went to sleep somewhere about here and then I must have got up and walked over there and lain down."

"Right by the cliff edge?"

"A few yards away."

"You might have gone over."

"Oh, there is a Providence who looks after sleep-walkers."

"I believe there is," said Martia. "At least a Providence that protects people from evil and danger. I don't like this place."

"Hyalos?"

"No; here. It feels like a room that has been locked up for ever so long—I should think no one ever comes up here, not even fishermen."

She paused and they could hear the faint murmur of insects and the fainter murmur of the sea. The wild goats were not feeding here to-day, they had moved towards the other side of the peak.

Martia, leaning on her side listening to the murmuring that filled the warm air, forgot for a moment her dislike for this place. The sense of release from the weariness and distress of life that had touched Bobby yesterday came to her now even more strongly than it had come to him, yet meeting with a stronger opposition. Looking across the hollow where the temple column lay, her eyes were fixed on a far-off gull, just a flake of white on the southern sky, when something in the hollow drew her gaze.

The air seemed boiling in the hollow. That was the only way she could express it to herself. Just as the air quivers and shakes over a hot sandy beach so the air in the hollow was disturbed.

Then suddenly the boiling ceased, the air became normal, but there was something left, a whirling, a residuum, a dream, a reality, a terror, grotesque, obscene, soul-shaking.

In the amazement of the moment she clutched her companion by the arm, clinging to him for ten or twelve seconds—releasing him for want of power to retain her grip.

Then, as quick as they could, rising to their feet, they left that place, saying not one word to each other as they made their way down and back to the beach in a silence understandable—if you have ever seen a faun.

Neither then nor during their after life did they ever refer to this terrible matter which formed, yet, a bond between them, the bond of a common danger which they had escaped.

CHAPTER XX

PLANS

From that day began the real work of the expedition. Grass-cutting in a burning sun—relieved by the fact that they found a water source from which they could not only drink, but refill the tanks on board—gave place to shifting moorings, exploring house after house of the town, sometimes finding nothing, sometimes jars, drinking-cups, small figures of earthenware more or less mutilated, and metal ornaments. In the fifteenth house they found a marble Hermes with winged feet, so light and delicate that, standing on the deck of the Lorna, he seemed on the point of taking flight towards the sun.

Even Bowler and his companions admired this "little chap with the sparrow wings on his feet." To Martia the thought came with a pang that she would have to part with him. All these things, by the contract, were Behrens', to be turned into money, and, long though she had known Behrens, she well knew that this thing was too valuable to be thought of as a gift.

Bad weather had interrupted them for a few days, and it was now over three weeks since the morning of Glastonbury's first descent. They had explored the Street of Victory all but the last six houses—that is to say, the part of it that promised treasure—and there remained the Street of the Winds and the Street of Hermes, which they had not even touched.

Nor would they touch them. Although they did not speak of breaking off work and going home they spoke quite definitely on the other point; at least Sam did, the others agreeing.

"Glastonbury is showing signs of being used up," said Sam. "And between you and me and the stern post I don't propose hunting through the rest of this town. Besides, we're pretty full up; every locker, not to speak of the sail-room, is stuffed with jars in straw, and the spare bunks won't hold any more statuary. As it is, you've had to put that discobolus thing in the lazarette. There's the bath-room you can stuff a few things into, and we might put anything that's not breakable in the ballast. There's room here in the cabin; but the bother is, the stuff has to be hidden, for we've got to put into Genoa on the way back—and there's the Customs. They haven't got to see any of those things, for the Italians are pretty strict about works of art, and they might think we'd taken them from some Italian island or territory. Anyhow, they'd stop them and make inquiries, and we'd have to say where we pinched them, and then the Greek Government would be notified. Only for all that we might take a deck cargo."

"But why put into Genoa?" asked Martia. "Why not go straight home or stop at some French port?"

"We've salted Genoa," replied the skipper of the Lorna. "They know us there. They know us as mad English cruising about for fun, and they won't bother to more than come on board and look at the papers and smoke a cigarette, whereas if I put into a French or any other port where we aren't known the Frogs would come on board and turn things over. The French Customs are beastly. They aren't so keen on works of art as the Italians, but they'd be down on us for not declaring them. See? As for going straight home without touching anywhere, I can't. Even if we fill up with water here, it's not enough for the run home. We may be held up in the Bay by bad weather. One never knows."

"When do you propose to start off?" asked Bobby.

"When we've done with the last of these houses and fished up that Victory thing in the street," replied Sam. "That'll give us a fuller cargo than we want."

It was in the last house, four days later, that they brought up the crown of the expedition—a marble Aphrodite, small, like all the statuary of Hyalos, not more than four feet from crown to base, but exquisite as a dream. The hands were folded on the breast, recalling the attitude of Botticelli's Venus rising from the sea. Unlike the Venus of Milo, she was entire, without loss of a finger of her perfect hands or a toe of the feet that rested on a plinth suggestive of a breaking wave.

The after cabin, which was Martia's, had two bunks, an upper and a lower. The Aphrodite was placed in the lower, fastened securely with lashings, and covered with a bunk coverlet.

"To-morrow," said Sam, "we'll pick up those Victory fragments in the street, and the day after, if this wind holds, we'll put out for home."

But things were not to be as easy as that.

CHAPTER XXI

THE SHIP

People boxed up together in a small boat like the Lorna react on one another in a most surprising way. Bad temper or good humour in an individual is felt by his companions as it never would be ashore. On board the Lorna that night, down in the cabin under the swinging lamp, Sam was the wet blanket.

He sat with his nose in a book while the other two talked. He did not seem to be reading so much as brooding. Bobby had given up the whole problem of Sam and Martia, and Sam's fits of depression, and so on. The girl had as good as told him that there was nothing between her and the skipper and he left it at that. The expedition up to this had put everything else aside, love included, and would do so till the English coast was reached and the contract with Behrens completed.

All the same, this brooding fit that had fallen on Samuel Hackett, now that work had relaxed, worried Bobby.

The only comfort to him was that there was no town ashore, no bars to which the depressed one could fly for relief in the shape of alcohol.

There was whisky on board the Lorna, but the presence of Martia was a restraining influence strong enough to prevent any outburst.

The Fates who try to spoil plans and wreck expeditions had, however, taken note of this last fact, as the sequel was to prove.

The ship's company retired early that night, and were on deck next morning an hour after sunrise. The engine having been set going, the ship was manœuvred over the selected spot and the anchor dropped.

The depths were not yet fully lighted, owing to the lowness of the sun, yet they could see glimmering up to them through the water the shattered group—the little wheel of the chariot, the horse's head, the figure of Victory growing momentarily more defined in the strengthening light.

Glastonbury, a cigarette in his mouth, was getting ready to don the diver's dress, and Sam was assisting Church to rig the tackle necessary for the work, when Bowler, who had been looking seaward, suddenly left the deck and swarmed up to the cross-trees. He clung there for a moment in silence. Then his voice came.

"Below there! Ship to the nor'-west, comin' up this way."

Then he came down with a run, and Sam, leaving the tackle to look after itself, and taking the glass from its sling, went up.

Glastonbury ceased dressing and lit another cigarette, whilst the others stood, faces uptilted, watching Sam.

Yes, away on the distance of that miraculous sea, blue as sapphire and lit by morning, a stain of smoke showed, and beneath the smoke an object that the glass resolved into a vessel of small tonnage travelling fast and making dead for Hyalos. It was the smoke-stain that had attracted the bird-keen eyes of Bowler from the deck, and without a glass he had been able to see the truth.

Sam came down with a run.

"This does us," said he. "I don't know what she is. Too quick and small for a freighter. Not a warship by any English standard, but these confounded foreign navies have all sorts of bumboats in their service. Whatever she is, she's coming here and there's sure to be trouble—cuss and confound her. We've got to camouflage. Man the winch and get the anchor in. Church, nip down and get the engine ready. Glastonbury, get all that truck of yours into the fo'c'sle. We'll bring her west of this place and drop the hook closer inshore. We're an English yacht put in the day before yesterday."

The others said not a word.

The clanking of the winch pawls filled the air, the anchor was brought home, and the Lorna, under the auxiliary and steered by Sam, turned and stole off across the agora, across the submerged theatre, across the tranquil bay, dropping anchor three cable-lengths from the shore.

Here the wily Sam, after another observation from the cross-trees that confirmed his worst suspicions, ordered the boat to be got over.

"What do you want with the boat?" asked Bobby.

"You'll see in a minute," replied the other.

They had brought a small tent for possible camping-out. It was stowed down below. He had it brought up and got into the boat that was now alongside. Then he ordered Church and Atherfield to take it ashore, set it up, and come back.

"We've been exploring the island and fishing," he explained to the others. "The tent will help the story out. Now there's nothing more to do but trust in Providence and have breakfast."

They went below, where Martia had laid out the things and made the coffee. There had been no time to cook anything, so they had to content themselves with canned stuff and biscuits. During the meal Bowler from time to time kept them informed, through the skylight, as to the doings of the stranger.

"You can see her from the deck now, sir. She's aisin' down. A boat pullin' off, sir, for the reefs."

From time to time, Sam or one of the others popped up on deck.

The thing was painted grey, with a yellow smoke-stack and a white deck-house. She looked as though she might be some foreigner's idea of a yacht. No Englishman would have been seen dead on board her at Cowes. The stove-pipe funnel, the sheer stern, and the size of the deck-house were enough in themselves; and, to complete the picture, the paint on the hull had gone rusty.

"She's a howling ambulance," said Sam. "She's no navy boat, unless the Digger Indians have started a fleet. And she hasn't been here before, else she wouldn't be sending that boat to take soundings of the channel. Look at that chocolate-box of a deck-house, and the rake of those masts, and the size of that jack-staff."

A siren that might have belonged to the Majestic suddenly let off, answered by a bellow from the astonished echoes of the island, and they saw that the stranger was moving again, following the boat through the channel.

The boat of the Lorna had returned from pitching the tent, and Sam, getting into her, prepared to put off and board the newcomer.

"I'll go and see them," said he. "It's better than them coming to see us. You can bet I'll do all I can to make them keep their distance and fool them."

He put off, Bowler and Church rowing, just as the stranger, passing the reefs, breasted the waters of the bay, going dead slow, a fellow in the chains swinging the lead and calling out the fathoms in a voice that came sharp as the cry of a gull.

"That's a foreigner," said Bobby, as he stood watching with Martia. "There's one thing certain, she doesn't know this place or she wouldn't be stealing in like that. At least, she doesn't know the passage and the soundings. There goes the anchor."

The rumble of the chain, following the splash, came across the water, and then they stood watching the Lorna's boat closing with the newcomer, Sam at the yoke lines steering to fetch her on the starboard side. They saw the ladder thrown down and the redoubtable Sam climbing on deck.

"He's talking to a tall, black-bearded chap in a white yachting cap," said Bobby, who had the glass. "He's pointing towards us and they're jabbering together. Now they've gone into the deck-house."

He handed the glass to the girl, and she put it to her eye.

"Oh, I can see it quite close!" cried she, as though the fact were a phenomenon. "Look at the little men on deck. They're all on this side looking at us. And there's a man throwing a bucket of water overboard. There's a man all in white with a white cap: he must be the cook. I can see a name on the bow."

"Can you read it?"

"Now I can, almost. And now I can't. It goes and comes. It's the movement of the ship. It's a double name. Santa—Santa——Oh, that's it, Santa Margharita. It's the name of a place near Genoa. I've heard it before."

She handed the glass back to him and they continued to watch the stranger, alongside which Bowler and Church in the Lorna's boat were seated, smoking and making no attempt to fraternise with the fellows on board.

Nearly half an hour passed, and then Sam, followed by the black-bearded man, appeared on deck, dropped into the boat and pushed off.

"It's all O.K.," said the skipper of the Lorna as he came over the side. "It's a chap that fancies he's doing a yachting trip in that bath-tub. Visconti is his name. Italian, and they've put in here to do a repair."

"How long will they be over it?" asked Bobby.

"Oh, says he'll be off to-morrow, and he's asked me to drop over and have dinner with him to-night."

"Didn't he ask us, too?"

"No," said Sam. "I told him the Lorna was my boat and I was down here for my health, and the fishing, and we went on yarning, without my mentioning you two, and suddenly he sprung the dinner proposition on me. It was too late then. I couldn't say I have two friends on board. It would have looked as if I were fishing for an invitation for you."

"I don't think it would," said Martia. "And if it did, why shouldn't you fish for an invitation?"

She was disappointed. A break in the monotony of the life on board would have been welcome. So would a change of food and the opportunity to put on an evening frock. She could have smacked Sam for his stupidity, but Sam had sense on his side as well as diffidence.

"You see, it's not only that," he explained. "It's the bother of getting too friendly with him and his staying on here and messing about. If we all went to dinner with him we'd have to ask him back. He'd be sure, anyhow, to call before leaving. Whereas, if I just nip over alone, the thing is ended and done with."

"Are you sure he's all right?" asked the girl. "I mean that he's not anyone connected with the Greek Government or anyone come to spy on us?"

"He's quite all right," said Sam. "He's a gentleman and he's cruising for his health."

"Oh, dear," said she.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing. Only that doesn't sound, somehow, as if it was all right. Was it on account of his health that he came exactly here? Didn't it seem funny, when you were talking to him, to think that you both had come here for your health, at least that you were both yachting for your health?"

"No," said Sam. "Why should it? These seas, at least the Mediterranean and Ægean, are pretty much health resorts. If two people met in Buxton, say, and told each other they had come there for their gout, would it be funny?"

"I'm not talking of Buxton. I only say the whole thing seems to me fishy. Does he call that thing he's in a yacht?"

"Yes. He hired her for three months. He's got no illusions about her. Couldn't. She's offal, and the deck-house is a cockroach trap. But he says she's good enough to 'see sunsets from,' and the open deck is his chief home on board of her."

"Italian?" asked Martia.

"Yes, he's Italian."

"Visconti," said Bobby, who seemed plunged in meditation. "Where have I heard that name before? Visconti—Visconti——"

"Genoa, maybe," said Sam.

"No, it wasn't in Genoa. It was before that, and it seems to me it was in connection with the expedition. It wasn't at Poole or at the stores. Somewhere or another I heard it, but I can't remember where."

"Well," said Martia, "there's no use in bothering if you can't. Maybe I'm hypersensitive and quite wrong. But I feel, somehow, as if danger had suddenly sprung up against us; as though we ought to beware of the man and his boat. Anyhow," said she, speaking to Sam, "if you go to dinner to-night, be careful of what you say. Don't let him trap you into telling anything. I know—I didn't mean to suggest you'd do anything foolish, I only meant to warn you."

"Thanks," said Sam, evidently huffed. "I'm not a child, whatever else I may be. And as for Visconti, he showed no sign at all of trying to pump me or of having any idea at all about this place except that it was a good harbour for a small boat to put into."

Martia said nothing more and went below.

She had a lot of work to do. Hers from the start had been the business of keeping things tidy below deck. During the treasure hunt, nobody had much time for anything but the great business in hand. As a consequence, things were all over the place and confusion everywhere. Clothes and all sorts of gear had been ejected from lockers to give place to the vases wrapped in straw, and small objects of statuary and things that ought to have been in the lazarette were finding refuge on the cabin floor.

She set to on these matters, but the work did not stop her from thinking; and the more she thought, the more she disliked the idea of Sam going off to dine alone with this gentleman who was cruising for his health. But there was no use in worrying, and the hard work of putting things straight soothed her mind. The stranger could know nothing of the work they had been doing, even if he knew of the existence of Hyalos. Their story was plausible, and the appearance of the tent ashore bore it out. All the same her mind, though quietened, was not quite satisfied.

At seven o'clock Sam, in his best coat and looking a bit more respectable than usual, was rowed off to the Santa Margharita through a blue luminous twilight, above which the constellations were sketching themselves, and through which the voice of the reefs came ghostly, mixed with the occasional weak cry of a gull.

Bobby and the girl watched him go and then went down to their own dinner—canned corned beef and potatoes boiled by Church, with canned asparagus to follow. The beef they had brought in the harness cask had suddenly become tainted, and they had been living for a week mostly on canned stuff, helped out with fish when they had time to do any fishing.

Anyone who has been condemned to live on canned food for any time will know how it palls. The fact that Sam was possibly enjoying a good dinner, served by a French cook, did not improve the flavour of the food before them, and Martia said so.

"The only comfort is," said Bobby, "that Sam doesn't know good from bad and can't be enjoying it."

He was sitting opposite to her, and it seemed to him that whatever else might be the outcome of the voyage, it had been up to this the re-making of the girl before him. The tired look had gone from her eyes and the colour that London had driven away had come back to her cheeks.

Martia was good to look upon as she sat there, the lamplight falling on her shapely little head; good to look at, despite the fact that her get-up would have destroyed the attraction of any Continental woman, consisting as it did of a coat and skirt the worse for sea-wear and salt. Bobby, alone with her for the first time in weeks, had to crush down the desire of his heart and leave unspoken the words rising to his lips. There was still much to be done ere he could treat her other than as a shipmate and fellow-worker and say to her what he wanted to say.

He got pretty near it, though.

"Even if he was," he went on, "he'd deserve it, for he's been working like a nigger this last month."

"We all have," said she.

"Yes, we all have, and we deserve what we've got. What do you think is the worth of the stuff we've hived already?"

Martia knitted her brows in thought.

"I don't know," said she; "anything over a hundred thousand pounds, I should think."

"A hundred thousand?"

"Why not? Some of these things are priceless; far, far above the rubies, for rubies are always being found. That Aphrodite alone might bring a little fortune. It all depends on finding a buyer."

"That's where Behrens comes in. He as good as told me that these things would go to America."

"If I tell you something," said Martia, "you won't speak of it to anyone else?"

"Never."

"Well, I believe Mr. Behrens has arranged that everything we find shall go to South America. Argentina. The wealth of Argentina is simply fabulous, and things can be sold there without too much bother as to where they came from. I'm telling you this in confidence, though he did not make me promise to keep it to myself."

"I shan't say a word," said Bobby, "but I'm glad to know. It makes things all the surer, and it seems to me there's almost certainly a big profit coming from this business. And that's what worries me."

"How?"

"This way. I'm to get half, according to my contract with Behrens. That is to say, half after all expenses are deducted."

"Yes?"

"Well, where do you come in? You've worked as hard as any of us."

"Me? Why I've had this trip for nothing. I don't want anything more."

He did not reply for a moment; he could not say what was in his mind, that whatever money he made was hers as well as his.

"We'll talk about that later on," he said at last. "There's no use in counting our chickens before they are hatched, and we haven't got the stuff home yet. But there's another point—Sam."

"I doubt if he'll take anything," replied she. "First of all he's one of those queer people who don't care a button for money, and secondly he looks on all this not as work but as fun."

"But he's worked a lot harder than I have."

"Yes; but what you call work isn't work to him. He's never happier than when he's in his shirt-sleeves rigging tackles and overhauling spars. He'd be absolutely and perfectly content if he could only repaint the Lorna on top of everything else. He was grumbling to me only yesterday because there was no paint on board."

Bobby said no more. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her right out what she had known about Sam in the past, and exactly what their relationship had been, but he restrained himself. Presently they went on deck, Martia retiring to her cabin about an hour later.

It was now ten o'clock, and as he sat smoking he could see the forms of the men, who had gathered for'ard round the fo'c'sle hatch, and away across the moonlit bay the lights of the Santa Margharita. It was a far cry from Cadogan Street and Piccadilly Circus, and the remembrance of London brought up before him the fact that his life in the course of a very few weeks had taken a new direction, and his future a new significance.

If what Martia said was true—and he felt that it was true—he was no longer a man scraping about to make a living at story-writing, but a man of means, maybe of wealth.

Twenty thousand pounds would be a fortune, and the profit of this wonderful haul from the sea might even bring him in much more than that.

The expedition was a success. It was only just in this minute of relaxation that he recognised the full fact, and the real meaning of it, and the truth that in a few weeks he had made what many a man labours a lifetime to make. Had made? Ah, there was the rub! The thing was not ended yet. They had still to face the sea's pleasure and the chance of storms. They had still to face mischance.

Everything up to this had been easy—too easy, almost. Of Fortune, one true thing can be said—that she has two faces, one beautiful as heaven, one hideous as hell.

Thinking like this, his eyes fell on the lights of the Santa Margharita, and a sudden vague uneasiness seized him.

What did that hooker want, putting in just now? There was no reason why she should not have put in to do a repair. Still, it was a nuisance. A day or two more and they would have been gone, and no one would ever have known that they had been to Hyalos. But there was no use in bothering. The Santa Margharita, whatever she was, had evidently never been here before, else she would have come in without sending a boat before her to take soundings. Hyalos was evidently as strange to her as it had been to them; stranger, for they had been able to come in without any bother.

If the people on board her knew nothing about the place, it was almost a sure thing that they knew nothing of the treasure city. Still, he wished Sam was back.

It was now a quarter to eleven.

He went forward and had a word with the fellows by the fo'c'sle hatch, then he paced the deck. The idea came to him to send a boat off for Sam, but the arrangement had been that the Santa Margharita people would send the skipper back, and Bobby put the idea away.

Time passed. The fellows on deck dropped below, leaving only Atherfield as anchor watch. The moon dropped further to the west. Then, at last, away over the water something showed. It was a boat, and at the same moment, like the windows of a house shutting up after some festivity, the deck-house lights of the Santa Margharita went out.

The boat came alongside to port. Bobby dropped the ladder. The skipper of the Lorna came on board, leg over rail, and the boat started back.

Sam was breathing hard, with his lips closed. He was not quite steady on his pins. He took Bobby by the shoulder and drew his head close.

"Is she in bed?" whispered Sam.

"Yes, that's all right," said the other. "What have you been doing?"

"Glorious time," whispered the festive one. "Awful good chap, that chap. Help us down. Don't make a noise."

When he was in his bunk he refused to undress. Bobby sat for a moment contemplating things.

Then a movement from the bunk drew his attention. Sam, with his hair horribly and suddenly tousled, was motioning him to come close.

"Don't tell her I got like this," whispered the reveller. "It's not what I've had has done me, but the worry of life. If you'd—ruined your life in the past same's I've ruined mine, you'd know—you'd know."

"Oh, shut up and go to sleep," replied Bobby.

CHAPTER XXII

THE DUMPING OF THE VICTORY

Lying awake that night, Bobby remembered again his first interview with Martia, and her talk about the predilection of editors and the public for stories with a feminine interest. He began to wonder, as he lay listening to the heavy breathing of the skipper, whether there ever existed a story, in real life or fiction, since the story of Adam, without some woman somewhere or somewhen having a finger in it.

If he had set out to choose on sight, for this expedition, a skipper absolutely fool-proof against females, he would have chosen Sam. Yet look!

How could he have known that Sam had a mysterious female somewhere in the background of his life; a love tragedy, the remembrance of which tended now and then to make him fly off the handle? He couldn't. Sam had been foisted on him as sound goods by the god of expeditions—who sends ships to sea with rotten garboard strakes, who puts weevils in biscuits, and leaks in water tanks: the god who loves to watch strong men fighting against adversity.

Had Sam talked on board the Santa Margharita? Had he by any chance said a word too much?

Bobby was quite sure that Samuel in no circumstances whatever would have told of their doings at Hyalos. All the same, he might by accident have done just as bad, letting fall a chance word that would arouse suspicion.

Well, if he had, the thing was done, and there was no use in bothering about it. Time would tell. Leaving it at that, Bobby turned on his side and fell asleep.

Coming on deck next morning, he found the festive one dressed and in his right mind, without a trace of his doings upon him. He was talking to Martia, telling her what a pleasant time he had spent the night before, the tonnage of the Santa Margharita, the fact that Visconti was a really good sort—a Neapolitan gentleman whose ancestry went back to the time of Virgil—that the Santa Margharita had damaged a cylinder-cover, which had been put right, and that she was off that morning back to Naples.

Bobby said nothing. He was content to let the matter rest at that and trust in the Providence that had protected them up to this.

After breakfast, when they came up on deck, the anchor winch of the Santa Margharita was rousing the shore echoes. Bowler got the flag ready and ran it up and dipped it as the stranger, turning in a big curve, made for the reef opening, her siren letting off in salute of the Lorna and her ugly stern showing as she cleared off down the channel.

In ten minutes she was a smoke-wreath on the far sea—a memory.

"Now fetch back that tent," said Sam, "and we'll go and scrape up that mess in the street."

The mess in the street, brought on board by eight bells—four o'clock in the afternoon—included the Victory, her broken wing, the little chariot-wheel and the horse's head. There were other fragments, but they were left. As it was, to use Sam's expression, they had bitten off more than they could chew. The Victory was impossible to stow. The only place for her was the fo'c'sle, and the fo'c'sle was over-crowded. Besides, the hatch was too narrow to get her down. It was the wing that did the mischief.

Sam proposed to break it off, but they could not do it. They could not break and brutally treat that living marble. Time and disaster had done enough to it. So they dumped her—and she was worth heaven only knows what.

The funeral took place after dinner, in the dark, just before the moon had time to lighten the depths of the bay. Getting into the boat which was alongside, they released her from the lowering tackle and let her slip into the darkness of the water, through which a long stream of phosphorescent bubbles rose, dissolved, and vanished.

"And that's the end of the job," said Sam, little knowing how far from them the end of the job was yet.

Next morning they filled the water tanks early and devoted the forenoon to exploring the parts of the city they had missed. Actually, notwithstanding all the time they had been there, they knew little of the place beyond the theatre, the agora, and the Street of Victory. Time being the essence of their contract they could not waste it. Never for a day, or for a moment, had they been quite free of the vague dread that someone might turn up to see what they were doing; some Greek naval boat or even some fishermen from Milo or Polykandro away to the north.

To-day they could breathe freely and look about them. It was their last day there, Sam having determined to weigh anchor next morning, and the last time, in all probability, that any one of them would see the place.

They rowed across the theatre and leaving the agora struck over the street to the right, named by Isaac Behrens the Street of Hermes. It seemed to them narrower than the Street of Victory, and the houses poorer. As for the Street of the Winds, opening on the east of the agora, it was narrower still.

There was no statuary, either standing or fallen, in these streets as in the Street of Victory, yet in the Street of the Winds they came on something more fascinating than any piece of sculpture.

The water was shallow here, only a couple of feet above the roof tops, and down below, at a depth of only five fathoms, lay a slab of stone with something written on it in Greek characters.

Sam declaring that he would dive for it, as the water was shallow, they put back to the ship and got some signal halyard line. Armed with this, he went down as he was and brought it up. It was a slab of marble about a foot by eighteen inches, and scratched roughly but fairly deep there appeared these characters:

Τὸ μέλημα τοὐμόν.

"What's the meaning of it?" asked the girl.

Bobby's classical education was enough to allow him to decipher the thing.

"It's a graph," said he. "Same as you find on the walls of Pompeii, only those are in Latin. Some fellow in love with some girl must have scratched it on the front of her house, which was probably faced with marble slabs. It means 'my darling.'"

He was probably right as to the origin of the thing, but he did not know that it was a tag taken from Sappho and possibly had some extra meaning, owing to the context of the lost poem to which it belonged.

Martia touched the words with her finger and a far-away look came into her eyes. Possibly she was thinking of the lover who had written that beneath the window of the girl he loved; on the wall of her house, or, maybe, on the wall of some public place, just to give relief to his heart; some lover whose very bones had vanished from the world but whose voice still spoke in the language of the human heart, which is older than Greek.

Bobby watched her.

He would have given a good deal to have known her thoughts.

She had cared for Isaac Behrens. Was it possible that she was thinking of him?

The vague absurd jealousy he had felt when Behrens had told him that she had been engaged to Isaac came back. He had forgotten it, almost, but Hyalos was Isaac's find, and this love message—was she possibly connecting it with Isaac's memory?

He wished that Sam had let the thing lie.

They rowed back to the ship, Martia holding the little tablet on her knee. Once on board she took it to her cabin as though she looked upon it as her own property.

Bobby could have kicked Sam.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE BOAT FROM ÆGINA

The start was fixed for eight o'clock next morning, immediately after breakfast.

There was nothing to hold them, and now that everything was clear, with a steady glass, a fair wind and a full hold, a strange uneasiness manifested itself amongst the afterguard of the Lorna Doone, infecting even Sam.

It was the uneasiness that comes with the all-but-accomplished.

Bobby during the night had dreamed that the Santa Margharita had somehow sunk herself in the reef passage, blocking their exit; Martia at breakfast was silent and Sam fidgety, rising to look at the glass.

The wind that had been blowing from west of north had shifted more to the north, but the glass still held steady.

The skipper returned to his breakfast and the chart which he had unfolded on the cloth. He was in the act of folding it up and rising from the table when Bowler's voice came through the skylight.

"There's a boat comin' up, sir," cried Bowler. "Looks as if she was layin' for the island."

Sam cast the chart on the table and dashed on deck. The others followed him.

Sure enough, away to the nor'-nor'-west, a boat was coming; a fishing-boat, seemingly, lateen rigged, with a vast triangular sail like a swallow's wing pencilling itself against the sky. She was coming with the swiftness of a swallow, and that she was making for Hyalos there could be no doubt.

"She's only some island craft," said Sam. "Heavens, isn't she laying the knots behind her? She's doing twelve, if she's doing an inch."

"Onhandy I call her," said Bowler. "That there yard was never made of a single spar. Where'd she be if it was sprung? It's easy for her goin' as she goes but I'd like to see her on a wind."

"What are you going to do?" asked Bobby.

"How d'you mean?"

"Well, oughtn't we to get out before she comes?"

"Oh, she's all right," replied Sam. "And she's seen us anyway. Better stick and find out what she's after, if she comes here. Ten to one she'll shift her helm."

"Yes," said Martia. "It's better not to run away. Let's just see what they want. Maybe, after all, they are not coming here."

Meanwhile, the sail loomed larger and took on colour. There was some dye in the canvas that now showed deep red and now rose-colour as the great lateen yard swung to the wind. The hull, because of its colour, was scarcely visible though she was coming close in now.

Yes, she was making for Hyalos. She took the passage through the reefs without dropping a shred of canvas, the foam shearing from her stem and the white gulls racing her across the bay in a grand curve, luffed up into the wind and stopped dead. An old stone killick went overside and the lateen yard came down with a run.

"Oh, how beautiful!" cried the girl, lost in admiration of this living thing from the sea, so full of life and speed and the very breath of freedom, yet in a moment tamed and halted. "I have never seen anything so lovely as that. And look at the colours of it!"

The hull of the stranger was painted a green-blue after the fashion of the Italian fishing-boats, turning to a darker tint near the water line. She was open, with a covered-in poop where the steersman stood, the goose-necked tiller still in his hand, and in the well, on the sand ballast, the crew of half a dozen fellows with red handkerchiefs tied round their heads were busy with the lateen yard and getting out a boat.

"They're coming aboard," said Bobby.

"Looks like it," said Sam. "If I didn't know to the contrary, I'd think they had business with us—either friends or going to pirate us."

But the boat that put off was no pirate. Only two fellows were at the oars and a third standing aft, with the steering oar.

It came alongside and hooked on and the steersman, dropping his oar, came overside. A man of thirty or so, bronzed, with curly black hair, rings in his ears and a smile that showed teeth evenly set and white as a hound's.

Facing the strangers, he bowed to Martia, and then went for Sam, who was standing a bit in advance of the others, in an explosion of language that might have been abuse only for his manner.

"He's talking bad Italian," explained Sam to the others after the torrent had lasted for a minute. "Petropolis is his name, as far as I can make out, and he expected to meet us here, and is apologising for being late. Rum business, and wants handling, seems to me."

He drew the newcomer aside, gave him a cigarette and then they talked.

Martia could not understand a word of what they were saying, but she noticed, as the bronzed one talked and gesticulated, that he seemed ill at ease, and now and then, as he swept his hand round indicating Hyalos, his face took on a wild look as though something had frightened him.

The talk lasted five or six minutes. Then it broke off and Sam turned to the others, whilst Petropolis, relighting his cigarette, stood suddenly quiet, his gaze roving about over the details of this strange ship as though whatever he had said had ceased to be of the slightest interest to him.

"Here's a rum yarn," said Sam. "This chap's from Ægina, away up north, and, as far as I can make out, he was hired by an Italian to come down here with his boat and bring four sponge-divers with him to meet a vessel that would be waiting for him here. He was to put in nowhere and say nothing to anyone, but he had to put in to Milo for water, and at Milo one of his men got talking to the fishermen, and let out that they were coming here. The fishermen warned him that Hyalos was haunted or some rot of that sort; that dead men lived here; and that not a fisherman in the islands would go near the place for fear of the bad luck it would bring. He thinks we are the boat he was to meet, and he's tumbling over himself with regrets because his men are nearly in a state of mutiny and the sponge-divers refuse to have anything to do with the place."

"I knew it," cried Martia. "I felt that there was something wrong about that man Visconti. His was the boat they had to meet. Cruising for his health? I never believed it."

"This is a nuisance," said Bobby.

Sam said nothing.

He saw as clearly as the others that the pleasant-spoken Visconti was, a million to one, not after health, but treasure.

The human mind, suddenly brought into juxtaposition with a fateful problem of this nature, often sees instinctively and in a flash its true proportions. Sam saw quite clearly that, though it was a million to one Visconti had come to Hyalos to dive for marbles, it was also a million to one against the probability that his expedition would have synchronised with that of the Lorna Doone by chance.

Hyalos had been lying sealed for two thousand years, yet the Lorna Doone and the Santa Margharita had arrived in the same month and for the same purpose—loot. Common-sense viewing this statement would say at once, "There must be some connection between these two expeditions; the coincidence is too extraordinary."

"Suppose we go down below and talk it over," said Sam.

He followed Martia down below.

"I can't see the sense in this business at all," said he when they were seated. "If that chap was lying, if he was really after the same game as we, why did he sail off and leave us here? He knew that this Petropolis man would be coming along and that, if we met him, we'd guess the truth. Leaving that aside, why didn't he stick till we were gone?"

"Maybe," said Bobby, "he thought we'd been working here and had cleaned out the place. That night you dined with him, did you say by any chance how long we'd been here, or say anything that might have given the show away?"

Sam flushed under his tan.

"Do you think I'm a fool?" he asked.

"Not at all," said Bobby. He did not wish to push the matter, seeing the condition in which the skipper had arrived home that night of the dinner party on board the Santa Margharita. All the same, he felt in his heart that Sam somehow or another had told more than he ought.

"Does Petropolis know that we aren't the people he was expecting to meet?" he asked.

"No," replied Sam. "He doesn't. I didn't say a word; just let him run on. He seems to think that the Italian fellow who gave him the order to come here was our agent."

"Then," said Martia, "the thing to do is to pay him anything he wants in reason, and let us get away at once. He can't ask much, as he says his divers refuse to work here."

Sam left the cabin and came back in a minute.

"I've squared him for a thousand lire," said he. "That's ten pounds. The chap's straight enough. He got ten pounds from the agent, whoever he was, and the terms were ten pounds a week, he paying the divers. It took him a week to come down, and it will take him a week to go back."

"Pay him," said Martia.

She fetched the ship's money, part of which was in sovereigns obtained by Behrens from the Bank of England, and they went up. Two minutes later Petropolis, with the money in his pocket, was overboard and rowing for his boat.

The breeze had freshened a bit.

Bowler, with a glance to windward, chuckled.

"It's either row her or tow her out, with the wind as it is," said he. "She come in easy, but it's not easy goin' out with a rig like that. Onhandy, I call her."

"They're getting the sail on her, anyhow," replied Sam, watching as the great lateen yard rose to a chorus like the calling of gulls. "Up goes the killick. Now we'll see."

The stranger, her great sail bellying to the blue, gave a bound like a startled horse and fled away shoreward, making a soldier's wind of it and aiming as if to smash herself on the rocks, came round in a grand curve and up into the wind, the foam racing out behind her as she sped towards the reefs, aiming like an arrow for the channel. Bounding over the slight incoming swell, and seeming to drive right into the wind's eye, she cleared the passage and was away to sea.

Martia, her lips parted and her eyes bright with pleasure, watched the departing one. It was less a ship than a creature, alive, sensitive, beautiful.

Bowler, hit in the place where he kept his predictions, turned away muttering something about the "Flyin' Dutchman."

Then at Sam's orders he went down to attend to the auxiliary engine.

The anchor was hove short and then broken out of the sand, the auxiliary got to work, and the Lorna, with Sam at the wheel, turned her nose to the break in the reefs.

Outside and beyond danger, the canvas went up and the ketch took the wind, heeling to port and with her nose to the west.

They were out at last and free, at least for the moment. Hyalos astern and far away towards the north the Greek boat, close-hauled and showing her coloured sail against the pale azure of the horizon sky.

A gull from the island astern, still following them, wheeled with a cry, drifted on the wind and then passed away, leaving them alone to pursue their course across a sea desolate as when the Argo had sailed it in pursuit of the Golden Fleece.

CHAPTER XXIV

A MAN OF WAR

The greatest bother about romance in real life is that it generally brings one outside the law—either the written or the unwritten law. The strangest thing about the romance of the Lorna Doone and her crew was the fact that it was only now, clear of land, successful and unpursued, that the law was beginning to trouble them.

The worry came to Martia first, before Hyalos had quite vanished from sight astern.

Her mind rejected the idea that they had done wrong almost as soon as it had formulated it. Hyalos was in the open sea, an absolutely desert island, belonging to Greece in theory but to the sea and to the past in reality. It was surely no more wrong to take marbles from its waters than to take fish or crabs, even though the marbles might be infinitely more valuable. Greece for two thousand years—either through ignorance of these treasures or through the superstitions of the islanders, who considered the place haunted—had never claimed them.

No, in a strictly moral sense they had nothing to worry about in the rescue of these things from the sea, or even in the sale of them. All the same, there was the question of International Law, which is not always moral, and what it might say or do to them in the event of discovery.

She was not alone with this worry. It was infecting the others, too. The lightheartedness with which the expedition had started, and which it had maintained up to the point of success, became dimmed by doubt and the shadow of anxiety.

The weather still held fine and the wind fair, backing into the east of north, and except for now and then a trace of smoke on the far horizon there was no sign of ship or hint of land till the morning when mountain tops, made gigantic by mirage in the western sky, told them that Cerigo was dead ahead.

Cerigo is the island pearl that hangs from the ear of Lacedæmonia; between it and the mainland lie the straits of Cervi.

Sam, having assured himself of his position, and wishing to keep all Greek land at the extremest distance, altered his course more to the south, till the great mountains dwindled on the starboard beam, dwindled and vanished, swallowed by distance, and the sea.

It was at the dinner-table on this day that Martia first spoke openly of what was in her mind, to the relief of the others, for they had all been thinking about the same thing, and blotting it up. They arrived at the same conclusion; there was no use in bothering now that the thing was done and, moreover, there was nothing to bother about in a moral sense.

They had thrashed the matter out, and Sam had even gone so far as to say that there was nothing to bother about in a legal sense, when, through the open skylight, came the voice of Church, who was on the watch.

"Smoke comin' up astern, sir," it said.

Sam jumped from the table, and, followed by the others, came on deck.

For a person who had no fear of pursuit or the law, his movements were singularly active.

When he took the glass, the hull of the ship making the smoke was beginning to show—a dot in the smother.

"It's either a destroyer or a torpedo-boat," said Sam, "or one of those rotten gunboats they've got in some of the navies since the war. They were old submarine-chasers sold off cheap, and mostly oil burners, but I believe there were coal burners, too, and I've heard Greece and Montenegro picked some up."

"It's coming along fast," said Bobby.

It was.

When Church had announced the stranger coming up from behind, the Santa Margharita had suggested herself to their minds, but this was not the Santa Margharita. The funnel told them that, also the hull—now clearly to be seen—low of freeboard and destitute of deck-house.

"Anyhow," said Martia, "she can't be bothering about us, even if she is a warship in a hurry."

"I'm only thinking," said Bobby, "that if Visconti turned sour, as the Yankees say, at thinking himself done in, he might, just from viciousness, set the bells ringing."

"There's not only that," said Sam, "there's the probability he'd get a reward. That's to say, if we have engaged on anything illegal, which I refuse to admit. Church, what are we doing?"

"Eight knots, sir," replied Church, who had just hauled in the log.

"The engine wouldn't add much?"

"No, sir; and we're running short of juice."

"We have no spinnaker," said Sam. "Might try a balloon jib, only I'm doubting if it's worth the raising. She's dipping her nose pretty deep already."

Bobby, as he listened, wondered why Sam should be so anxious to crack on if he were sure of the position and of the fact that they had done nothing illegal.

He said nothing, however, but kept his eyes fixed on the stranger, who was growing like a djinn, the wind banking her smoke in the form of a plume.

She was not exactly astern, more to the north of their course, and as this fact became apparent, all nervousness left the watchers.

They were not being pursued. Here was a warship, it was true, but she was not aiming for them. She was most evidently on one of the thousand petty businesses that engage the small navies of the Mediterranean powers, from the chasing of sponge-poachers to the pursuit of contraband.

She came along, lifting the distance over her at a fine rate, till she showed in all her hideous simplicity added to by a touch of rust and neglect.

No, she was not a chaser, but one of the experiments in hideousness that the Mediterranean shipbuilders make now and again in their efforts after speed and battle-worthiness.

Not quite a destroyer, not quite a torpedo-boat, not exactly a gunboat, she slashed along through the blue sea, showing through the glass a plume of foam at her forefoot and two figures in naval uniform beside the steersman on her bleak bridge.

She seemed pursuing her way aloof and absolutely unconscious or contemptuous of the Lorna Doone's existence. It was quite satisfying to watch her in her pride and to feel by contrast the humble insignificance of the Lorna.

They would have been content if the ketch had been even more humble and insignificant. They had no false pride at all in that matter now.

Suddenly, and as though she were a blind thing that had only just sighted them, the stranger altered her helm.

In a moment she was coming for them like a hawk.

Next moment a plume of white smoke jetted from her, and blam! the report of a gun hit the sea.

"We're done," said Bobby.

Sam moistened his lips. He gave orders to the steersman to bring the Lorna up into the wind to wait for the oncomer whose imperious order had just spoken itself. Then he watched, disgusted with the tactics of the other and wondering what on earth would happen in the next five minutes.

He was certain that this was an overhaul.

The newcomer showed a flag at her jack-staff, but it was so dirty that they could not tell whether it was Greek or Roumanian or what. She came sheering along to within a couple of cable-lengths, then rang off her engines and set them full astern, turning the sea into a lather and incidentally, through some mis-shift of the helm, nearly ramming the Lorna, whilst Bowler, who had sprung into the main shrouds, told them in the fearlessness of innocence, and frankly to their faces, that they were a pack of sanguinary tailors. In reply to which they dropped a boat.

Next moment a fat little man, all smiles, came on board, leg over rail. He saluted the quarter-deck, swept his hat off to the girl, and addressed himself to Sam, who had stepped forward to receive him.

They spoke in Italian, and Martia could not understand what they were saying.

"He wants to know if we have seen a boat, like our own, manned by Italians and engaged in the contraband business," Sam explained. "He knows we aren't the craft he's hunting for, because of the lady and also because we are English, and also because I have just told him we are a yacht—which he can see plainly."

"Take him down and give him drinks," said Bobby, the weight of mountains suddenly lifted from his mind.

"He also wants to know if we have any sugar to spare," went on Sam. "They have run short, the steward having forgotten it, as they had to leave Ægina in a hurry."

"Plenty," said Martia. So great was her relief that she could have hugged the little fat man. Whilst Sam took him down to the cabin for drinks, she went to the galley where the sugar was stowed in a locker.

Two pounds of lump sugar went overside with the commander of the Kosmos—for that was the name of the warship. Caps were waved from the bridge, the engines were set going, and as she drew away a cartridge was rammed in the gun and fired by way of salute.

The Lorna Doone, taking the wind again, filled her sails and resumed her course.

"That's a job well over," said Sam. "I don't believe those chaps were hunting for contraband. They ran short of sugar for their coffee, that's all. We've been getting scared over nothing, and I'm not going to bother any more about anything. We're as safe as houses."

"Are we?" said Bobby. "I'm not so sure of that. At least, maybe we are safe enough, but I believe those fellows were after more than sugar. You remember he said he had to leave Ægina in a hurry? Well, Petropolis came from Ægina."

"So he did," said Martia.

"What are you driving at?" asked Sam.

"Just this: Visconti evidently sent an agent to Ægina to get those sponge-fishers to come to Hyalos for the diving. The agent may have talked, and wind of some contraband work has got about. Of course it may be only my fancy, but you see there are three coincidences. First of all Petropolis leaves Ægina on secret business; secondly, the Kosmos clears out of Ægina hurriedly and evidently in chase of something; thirdly, she comes down south to this part of the sea."

"And fourthly," said Martia, "that little man said he was looking for an Italian boat, and the Santa Margharita was Italian."

"You're suggesting that he is hunting for the Santa Margharita?" asked Sam.

"Yes."

"Well, how can he? He distinctly said he was looking for a boat like ours."

"If you ask me," said Bobby, "I believe that chap is overhauling everything small that he meets with. If he was going on rumour, he wouldn't know exactly what the Santa Margharita was like. I don't want to be a scaremonger, but we've got to be careful. We're not out of the wood yet, it seems to me."

Bobby was one of those provoking people who keep their cleverness for the wrong moment. His memory was so tricky that, though Visconti's name seemed familiar to him, he could not remember where he had heard it. He was always mislaying things and forgetting where he had left them, and remembering things that he ought never to have forgotten. This brain-wave of his, coming at the moment, served no useful purpose, and only tended to make them uneasy. "We've got to be careful!" How could they be careful? How could they resist an overhaul from any warship that chose to speak to them?

Sam said all this, and said it with considerable vigour. Martia concurred without speaking. Bobby, after a last look at the vanishing smoke of the Kosmos, went down below, silenced if not convinced.

Two days and a half took them across the blue Ionian Sea, showing them Ætna and Cape Spartivento ahead of them, lit by the light of an afternoon that seemed to have strayed from the Golden Age.

They ran the Straits of Messina by moonlight, the shore to port all fairy lights and orange groves, and a great Messagerie boat, lit like a ball-room and with a band playing, gave them her wash as she passed to starboard. The air was warm as summer and filled with the scents of Sicily, which pursued them as morning broke on the Tyrrhenian Sea, showing the Lipari Islands far on the port quarter like purple splashes on an ocean of azure.

Fishing-boats with coloured sails; a three-masted schooner, close-hauled and steering for the Straits; a tanker, almost hull down and making towards Naples; every hour now showed ships like these, some far, some near, for now they were in the zone of the populous seas and the desolation of the Greek waters no longer covered them with its cloak.

Sam, in his wisdom, determined to give as wide a berth as possible to the continental seaboard, and steered west till the Sardinian coast showed them its far mountains by day and its sea lights beckoning by night. Then he kept on north-west, raising Corsica till he reached its great long finger-tip, which points almost straight at Genoa.

Beyond this the winds that had followed them so faithfully dropped, and a wind from the Pyrenees took its place, with a lumpy sea, across which, one grey dawn, a winking light showed beneath a cloud which turned with the sunrise into the hills above Genoa.

CHAPTER XXV

GENOA AGAIN

The sea was dashing high on the breakwater as they came in, passing through the outer harbour and taking up their old anchorage near the Silos Wharf.

The grey dawn that had threatened rain had passed, the clouds had dispersed, and the sun was lighting the hills and the harbour, more densely packed with shipping than ever.

The Customs officials and port doctor came off—the very same men they had parted with only a little time back—came on deck, did not even trouble to go below, smoked cigarettes, talked to Martia in broken English, and went away smiling.

"Now," said Sam as they sat at breakfast twenty minutes later, "if I hadn't thought of putting in before and getting known to those greasers, they'd have been all over the shop, poking about. As it is, we are all right now. The greatest difficulty is over, unless we fall in with bad luck in the way of weather and have to run into some port to refit. That's not likely, though. The spars are sound, and you couldn't break the hull, not with a pick-axe."

"How long are we going to stay here?" asked Martia.

"We ought to clear out the day after to-morrow," replied the other. "We'll get the water on board to-night and the stores, and I want to have a thorough overhaul of the rigging."

"I've got a list of the stores we want," said Martia. "I suppose you'll get the water from the same people on the quay over there who filled the tanks before?"

"Yes; and the stores from the ship-chandlers. Their boat will be along for orders this morning, sure."

"There it is," said Bobby.

The sound of a boat coming alongside could be heard through the open skylight, and Bowler's voice. Next moment the seaman was standing in the doorway of the saloon.

"A tellygrum for you, sir," said Bowler, handing Sam an envelope.

Sam snatched the envelope and read the message.

"Come to Chiavari to luncheon Hotel d'Italie to-day—important business.—Vanjour."

The envelope was addressed to: "Hackett. Yacht Lorna Doone, Genoa Harbour."

"What the devil is the meaning of this?" asked Sam, handing the paper to the others.

"The chandler's boat is alongside, sir," said Bowler. "They brought the message, and the chap's waiting to see you about orders."

"Tell him to wait and I'll see him in a minute," replied the skipper of the Lorna. Then, when Bowler had vanished: "What is the meaning of it?"

"I don't know," said Bobby. "Who on earth is Vanjour? How does he know we're here? And where's Chiavari?"

"It's on the railway line a bit down the coast," said Martia, who had taken the map of Genoa and its environs from the map rack, and spread it on the table. "I remember the name. It's somewhere near here——Oh, there it is!" She pointed with her finger to the spot. "It's quite close, and on the railway line."

"Maybe it's someone to do with Behrens," suggested Bobby.

"Behrens?" said Sam. "But how could he know we had put in here this morning?"

"He may have told someone to be on the look-out for us."

"And look," said Martia. "This telegram hasn't come from Chiavari, but from Genoa. It's a telegram letter. Someone has been waiting for us to come in, and then sent this off. They evidently did not want to meet you in Genoa, for some reason or other. I think it must have to do with Mr. Behrens. You remember I wrote him from here, telling him we'd arrived safely and would put in here on our way back."

"I'd forgotten that," said Sam. "That's what it is, as sure as eggs."

"It's very likely himself under an assumed name," put in Bobby. "Anyhow, it can't be anyone else. You'll go, of course?"

"Of course I'll go," replied Sam. "It looks to be quite close. Will you two see to the stores whilst I'm gone, and the filling of the tanks?" He looked around him.

If ever you have seen a true-blue small-yacht owner or skipper leaving his vessel in charge of others, even for a day, you will have seen Sam at this moment giving directions like a house-keeper off for a holiday.

He suggested that certain ports should be shut, to keep out the coaling dust that a vast brute of a Brazilian liner, with derricks out and barges alongside, would be making in a moment if the wind strengthened. He ordered this and that to be done, retired, reappeared presently in a more presentable rig and a bowler hat, got into the ship-chandlers' boat, issuing directions every step of the way, and was rowed off.

"Thank heaven," said Bobby. "Now we'll be able to think."

"Are you sure he'll be all right?" asked the girl nervously.

He knew what she meant. He had no fear at all of Sam making an alcoholic fool of himself to-day. He had got to understand the skipper. Sam with real business on hand was to be trusted.

"You needn't be a bit afraid," said Bob. "Hackett, though he might fly off the handle once in a way, isn't that sort. He's as steady as anyone, and a jolly sight better than a lot of people who call themselves saints."

"I'm so glad to hear you say that," she rejoined, with a sigh of relief. "I'm not bothering about to-day so much as about things in general, and his future. I feel just as you do about him. He's a splendid character, if only—if only he had some real interest in life, someone to care for him and take care of him."

Bobby agreed, but he felt rather flattened out. Why was she bothering about Sam's future? For a moment an almost overwhelming impulse came upon him to take her aside, and, throwing everything else to the winds, tell her the truth, which she must have guessed by this; that he loved her.

Common-sense stopped him.

They had to think of stores, of the water-supply, of the overhaul of the ship. They were in Genoa Harbour with perhaps a hundred thousand pounds worth of cargo on board that the Genoa port authorities would certainly seize if they knew of it. A turn of the wheel and the whole lot of them might be seized with the cargo and the ship and put in prison. They knew absolutely nothing of the complicated Italian law of contraband as applied to articles theoretically belonging to a friendly Power, Greece, and if they had met with a lawyer versed in the business they would have been afraid to ask.

No, it was not a time for love declarations or philandering of any sort.

Amongst the other directions left by Hackett, was one for the overhaul of the engine. Bobby went below with Bowler to attend to this messy job, leaving the girl on deck. It took hours, and when it was done, and a luncheon of sardines and biscuits consumed, the chandler's boat arrived alongside with stores that had to be stowed, and after the chandler's boat, came the water supply for the tanks.

Now, the people who attend to this business in Genoa Harbour do not consider themselves slaves, as far as Time is concerned. Sam had ordered the supply for that evening, expecting that it would come on board by next morning at the earliest. But by some chance—perhaps fortunately for the crew of the Lorna Doone—the foreman, being slack of work for the moment, sent it off by two o'clock.

By four everything was finished, the decks cleared up and afternoon tea served in the cabin.

At half-past four they came on deck. The awning that had been raised after breakfast was taken down, and Bobby had just brought a basket-chair up from below for the girl, when Church, who was forward, gave them word that a boat was putting off to them.

"It's the captain," said Church.

It was.

He was being rowed off in a shore-boat, and when he got alongside he paid off his men without regard to change.

Martia saw at once that something had occurred, but she said nothing, following whilst Sam led the way below, where the first thing he did was to fill a pipe.

"Well," asked Bobby impatiently, "what's up?"

"Everything, maybe," said Sam, taking his seat. "And maybe nothing. Any tea in that tea-pot? Well, give us a cup, and chuck us those matches. Well, I'll begin at the beginning. Soon's I landed, I made a bee-line for the station and got a ticket for Chiavari and found a train just on the point of going. I got there hours too soon, but it's one of those beastly places that the trains run crooked to, and if you don't take the first train you can get, it's heaven knows how long you'll be getting there. I'd left my pipe behind, and for two hours I had to sit about in gardens and places with nothing to smoke but Italian cigarettes. I'd called at the hotel, but no M. Vanjour was staying there. However, I didn't expect him to be waiting for me. I reckoned he'd turn up about one o'clock. And he did. The hotel déjeuner was served at half-past twelve, and I was sitting in the smoking-room listening to the clatter of knives and forks, when the manager came to me and said that the friend I had been asking for had arrived. I went into the lounge and there he was. A little dried-up old chap, like a Spaniard. He was well dressed, but he wasn't quite a gentleman. 'You are Mr. Hackett?' said he. 'Who has done me the pleasure of accepting my invitation to luncheon?'

"'I'm him,' said I. 'And I must say your invitation came as a surprise to me, for, if I'm not mistaken, we've never met before in our lives.' I was on the point of saying to him at first: 'I suppose you are a friend of Mr. Behrens?' but something stopped me; something told me to keep off the grass. This bird didn't please me a bit, and I determined to lay low. Funny things instincts are.

"'No,' said he. 'We have never met before. But I don't doubt that this meeting will be to our profit. However, we will discuss that matter after luncheon. I have asked the manager of the hotel to give us a private room.'

"I was in a fix. I was beastly hungry, but I didn't at all like the idea of having to sit and eat with this man. However, I was into the thing up to the neck, and we had luncheon and he talked of the weather and all sorts of rot till the coffee was in and the waiter had cleared off. Then he lit a cigar and leaning across the table, he said: 'I didn't ask you to Chiavari, Mr. Hackett, to share this bad luncheon, but to speak to you about your cargo.'

"You could have knocked me off my chair with a feather, and he saw it. Then I recovered myself, for it came to me that he might, after all, have something to do with Behrens.

"'Well,' I said, 'what about my cargo?'

"'Ah, what about it?' said he with a wink.

"Then I knew at once that he was working on his own, and that, even if he was in the know through Behrens, he was playing his own game.

"'What about it?' said he. 'Just this,' he says. 'I propose a deal. It is not often a valuable cargo like that comes into Genoa Harbour—Greek tobacco from a crop that grows under the sea. I propose a deal,' he says again. 'We go shares and I say nothing.'

"There it was, out.

"'I'll see you go to the devil first,' I said to him. 'And for two pins I'd ring the bell and send for the police.'

"You see, I knew I was dealing with a crook. He'd plainly threatened to go to the police and tell on us if I didn't split with him; but I knew that these sort of men don't do that sort of thing. They are too shy of the police and Customs.

"He threw up his hands. 'Well,' he said, 'if that is how you take my offer we will say no more.'

"I rang the bell and paid my bill, for I would not allow him to pay for me. Then I went off and left him smoking his cigar. There was a car waiting in front of the hotel. I expect it was his. I went to the station and got a train back. Got to Genoa a little after four. That's all."

"You did perfectly right," said Martia. "It would be fatal to show any weakness before a man like that."

"I'm not sure," said Bobby. "Remember we are in Italy, not England. An English crook wouldn't go to the police, maybe, but the English and Italian police differ. The Italians might give him a big reward for splitting on us."

"But who can he be?" asked the girl. "How does he know about us? Behrens is the only person who knows. Unless that man Visconti—but even he knows nothing of what we have on board."

"Unless he guessed," said Bobby. "Even so, he was on the same job himself and wouldn't be likely to split. And he didn't know we were coming to Genoa. But there's no use in talking. I don't like this development a bit, and I think we ought to clear out right away. The stores and the water are on board. There's nothing to hold us."

"Oh, the water's on board, is it?" asked Sam.

"Yes; it came just after the stores."

"Then out we'll get," said Sam, "directly it's dark."

"Why wait for dark?" asked Martia, her mind filled with the nightmare feeling that disaster was only to be avoided by immediate escape. "Why not now—at once?"

"Because," said Sam, "if this chap is part of a gang, he's back in Genoa by now. They'd see us clearing and they might have the means to follow us, see? They may be Camorra men, and they'd think nothing of boarding us and scooping us; maybe sinking the boat with us when they'd done. It's the big sum of money involved that would make that possible. No, I'd prefer to meet and risk the Customs and police rather than put out with that hornet's nest at our heels. After dark we can steal out with the lights dowsed and the auxiliary going. After dark? What am I talking about? No, a couple of hours before sun up. That's the time a port is really asleep."

"But suppose they boarded us here and scooped us?" asked Bobby.

"Nonsense! Things like that aren't done. A shout would raise the harbour. No, the only thing we have to fear here is the police, and I'm perfectly sure we're safe from them. At least, it's a hundred to one these chaps won't meddle with the law."

"There's one good thing, the engine is over-hauled and cleaned," said Bobby. "I got to work on it directly you'd gone. Seems like Providence, too, the water coming off so soon."

"Yes, that was a good thing," replied Sam.

He seemed preoccupied and as though he were turning over something in his mind.

They came on deck.

The evening had grown warmer with the sinking of the sun, whose rays came almost level through the forest of shipping occupying the west of the harbour.

Tugs passed here and there and lighters heavy with grain-sacks. A yellow-funnelled Nederland Line boat moored to the Silos Wharf was letting off her siren. She was due out, and the fellows were already standing by the shore-fasts whilst the last trucks of luggage were coming along the quay.

Sam contemplated this picture for a moment, then setting Bobby, Atherfield, and Glastonbury to some work on the rigging, he ordered Church and Bowler into the boat.

"I'm just going to nose round the harbour for a moment," said Sam.

He steered first for the outer harbour. One might have fancied that he was examining the fairway and its possibilities of danger to a craft making out at night. But the harbour of Genoa has no dangers in the way of sand or mudbanks; it is all clear water. Sam was inspecting the shipping.

Moored to the wharves out here were big boats from Singapore and the East, a foxy-looking collier from the Levant, a Clan turret boat, and several smaller fry; nothing to interest Sam.

He turned the boat and made for the middle and west of the inner harbour. Here to the west the ships were packed, sailing ships; schooners from the Italian shore; nondescript steamboats, some of which seemed to have been rotting at their moorings for years. Amongst them the eagle-eye of Sam picked out a craft lying astern on to the fairway, a boat that had been repainted recently.

He had started out to see if amongst the shipping the Santa Margharita might be hidden, to see if by any chance Visconti might be here and at the bottom of the Vanjour business. This repainted craft was not at all unlike her. She had a similar funnel and about the same tonnage. But the name on the bow was invisible, and he dared not draw closer to inspect.

He turned the boat and made back for the Lorna Doone.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE CUSTOMS

He was disturbed in his mind, but he said nothing when he came on board. There was no use in worrying the others, and he had reasons of his own for keeping silence. All the same, if Visconti were here in Genoa and the prime mover in the Vanjour business, the thing was more serious than it had seemed at first.

Visconti, from what he knew of him, was no ordinary man. If he were a crook, then he must be at the very top of his profession. He had the manner and appearance of an Italian nobleman, and it was possible that he was strongly enough placed to be able to make overtures to the Italian police. Failing to make profit out of the cargo of the Lorna himself, he might choose to make profit out of the information he could give about it to the authorities.

For a moment Sam almost regretted that he had not closed some sort of deal with Vanjour. Half a loaf is better than no bread.

Down below, smoking a pipe whilst the others were busy on deck, the unfortunate Sam had a very unhappy quarter of an hour. His unhappiness came from this: he could not remember exactly what he had said during that pleasant evening which he had spent on board the Santa Margharita at Hyalos, under the influence of Italian champagne, cigars, liqueurs, and the fascination of Visconti's personality. He did remember having said that he was touching at Genoa on the way back—a quite innocent remark between two honest sailor men, but a deadly admission if Visconti was a rogue. What else had he said that might have given the whole business away by implication? He could not tell.

Not only did he feel that he might possibly have betrayed his companions, he felt also that he ought to tell them. Yet what good could it do? The thing was done and over, and all the confessions in the world were of no avail.

Besides it would be a horribly unpleasant business, for he would have to own up before Martia to having taken too much liquor.

He came on deck.

Dusk was just closing her hand on the world, and the shore lights beginning to sprinkle themselves from the great fort on the left across the terraced city, preparing itself for the gaiety of the night. The wind had shifted to east of north, a quarter almost exactly opposite to that from which it had blown in the morning.

What did that portend? Sam could not say. He was not up in the tricks of the Mediterranean weather. The glass was steady: that was enough for him. He set to work helping the others, though their work was nearly finished.

Then they went downstairs for supper.

"How'd it be," said Bobby, as they sat over the meal, "to shift our moorings now and get into the outer harbour? It would be easier for us getting out."

"You can't anchor there," replied Sam. "You'd have to berth beside one of the steamships, and you can't do that without giving notice. No, even if we could, I don't believe in two starts."

"Won't they hear the winch taking in the anchor?"

"Who?"

"The harbour people. They'd be sure to think it funny us clearing out at such an hour."

"I'm not going to raise the anchor. I'll knock the shackle off the chain and drop it. I have two spares."

"Listen!" said Martia.

Through the open skylight came sounds as of a boat arriving alongside, of oars being got in, and the voice of Atherfield and—a foreign voice.

The people seated at the table looked at one another. Martia grew a bit pale, and Bobby half-rose from his chair.

"Sit down!" whispered Sam. "And whatever you do, don't seem to be flustered if it's anyone that's——"

"Port man come up to see you, sir." Atherfield, standing in the doorway, stepped aside, and the "port man" entered.

A stout little man with brass buttons on his coat and wearing a gold-braided cap, which he removed at sight of Martia. He bowed in her direction. He was very polite, this representative of the port authorities, but to the girl, brutality of manner would not have been a whit less terrible than this politeness which spoke of power.

"Captain Hackett?" asked the stranger in a tentative voice.

"I'm him," said Sam, who had risen from the table.

"So. Well, I have some little business with you, Captain Hackett. I am from the Customs Superintendent, and I have my men with me, but I am sure we will not need them at all. Just a few questions to ask you, Captain Hackett. Thanks, I will sit me down. Now my papers." He took a bundle of blue papers from the pocket of his coat, "Now my spectacles." He put on a pair of pince-nez. "Very useful things, spectacles, but very great what you call a nuisance. Will not the lady sit down?"

He opened one of the blue papers and glanced at the writing on it for a moment, then folded it, and put the whole bundle of papers back in his pocket, took off his pince-nez, and toyed with them as he spoke.

"You Englishman?"

"Yes."

"And this lady and this gentleman English?"

"Yes, and the crew. All English."

"Boat of pleasure?"

"How do you mean? Oh, a yacht. Yes, that's so."

"No contraband on board, not declared?"

"You mean tobacco and stuff?"

"Captain, I said contraband."

"No, there's neither liquor or anything that you reckon is contraband."

"No wines, liqueurs?"

"No."

"No objects of art shipped from Italy?"

"No."

"Ah, well, it is in our information that this is not so. Pardon me for saying so, Captain Hackett."

"Let's be clear," said Sam. "I have some objects of art, as you call them, but they are not from Italy."

"Ah, you have some objects of art, but they are not from Italy. Where then are they from?"

"Greece."

"You have the papers to show that they are from Greece; bought in Greece?"

"No; we found them in Greece."

"You found them in Greece! Then from the Greek Government you will have papers of permission to find those things and to take them with you."

"No, I haven't any papers. We found them on an island."

"So. Well, it is our information that these things were taken from Italian soil. But we will leave that for the moment. I must make examination."

"Certainly," broke in Martia, then, turning to Sam, "Show him everything we have and he will see that they are Greek. Nothing like them was ever found in Italy, of that I'm sure."

She went to a locker and took out one of the vases, carefully wrapped in dried grass, and presented it to the officer. He took it, held it under the light and turned it about without comment. Then, still under the lead of Martia, the general inspection began. The Aphrodite in the bunk, the things hidden here and there, some in the bath-room, some in the galley—everything down to the Eros standing on its head, was revealed, inspected, and noted.

Then they came back to the cabin and sat down again.

Bobby produced a tin of cigarettes and the officer accepted one and lit it. He seemed mollified by the frank treatment he had received.

He took a paper from his pocket and made some notes then looking up:

"There is nothing more but these things you have shown me?"

"Nothing," said Sam.

"Well, that brings the affair to conclusion."

Martia gave a deep sigh of relief.

"It still remains that the ship is under arrest. What you say of these things being Greek I cannot determine. It must be put before the authorities at Naples, where the experts are. I believe you honest people and what you say to be truth, but I am not the Government. The ship must be taken to Naples. My men will take it there and you will all come ashore with me to attend the enquiry at Naples."

"Oh, good gosh!" said Bobby.

Sam said nothing.

"But surely," cried Martia, waking out of a horrible paralysis and feeling exactly as though she were in a nightmare—"surely you are not going to arrest us?"

"Arrest? No!" said the officer. "I will treat you, madame, and your companions with every consideration. But I must do my duty. There will be nothing but the going ashore and coming with me, not to-night, but on the morrow morning, just as friends. It will be nothing but coming with me till the enquiry makes it plain about this matter. And then I hope indeed it will be my pleasure to see you depart from Naples in your ship with these things. You will stay in an hotel at Naples for the enquiry, which will be expedited as rapidly as in our power."

"And our men?" asked Sam.

"They too, must come. The ship is under arrest, and in strictness it is my duty to ask you all to come with me ashore to-night, but you will have your things to pack and take with you and I wish to cause you no inconvenience."

"But," said Sam, "the expense."

"Should the enquiry prove in your favour, captain, the Italian government will see to the expense. If otherwise——"

He shrugged his shoulders.

Then he rose and gathered together his papers.

"You will not leave the ship? I have your parole?"

"Yes," said Sam, "I promise we won't leave the ship."

"Well, then, till to-morrow morning," said the other. "And do not be afraid, miss"—laying his hand in a kindly manner on Martia's arm—"there will be nothing of unpleasantness for you. Just the matter of coming ashore with me and taking the train for Naples. No police show. Nothing. I wish you good-evening."

They accompanied him on deck and saw him overside into the boat that was waiting.

Then they went below.

No one spoke for a moment. Bobby helped himself to a cigarette. Martia took her seat at the table.

The prospect before them was frankly appalling. They had all to go to Naples, afterguard and crew. The ship would be brought there. The enquiry might take months, and every newspaper in Europe would be full of it. Greece would have her say. They would have to engage counsel, pay hotel expenses, and were sure to lose in the end.

It would be a ruinous affair for all concerned.

"What I want to know," suddenly burst out Bobby, "is—who put these Customs chaps on to us? Vanjour? It couldn't be anyone else, and he's a crook, for he offered to share in the business. Well, we've got them there."

"How?" asked Martia hopelessly.

"How? Why, we can prove that the police are in league with Vanjour. He wouldn't have given the show away without being sure that he would profit by it. He wouldn't have done it simply from spite."

"I don't see how we are going to prove anything," replied the girl. "We have only our word to back us. Can't you see?"

Sam, who had been sitting with his face in his fists, suddenly looked up.

"Look here," said Sam. "We have committed no crime here. We haven't tried to run contraband. We have things on board that aren't even listed among contraband articles. I don't believe that, strictly according to law, they have any right to detain us here. I think they've overrun their cable. I know a good deal about port authorities and their ways, and I know they often do things quite indefensible simply because they have the power. They are the most arbitrary lot in the world."

"Why didn't you tell that to the Customs man?" asked Bobby. "And what's the good of talking? They have the power, and that's everything."

"You wait a minute," said Sam. "If we were out beyond the three mile-limit what could they do?"

"Take us and haul us back."

"Could they? Well, maybe they could. But that would be seizing a British ship on the high seas, and at once we could put the matter in the hands of the British consul. And on what charge would they seize us? For being in Genoa Harbour with articles on board that are neither contraband nor munitions of war? Didn't you notice that this fellow is so uncertain of his position that he has not done what he would have done if he had been sure we were breaking the law—put us all in quod right away? But leave all that aside. If we were once out beyond the sight of land, they might whistle for us. I'm going to have a try."

"To get out?"

"Yes. Creep out as we intended to. It's our only chance."

"But you gave your parole," said Martia.

"Yes, not to leave the ship. I'm not going to leave the ship."

"But they'll be watching us."

"Not they. If we tried to go ashore it would be different. But they'll never think of us going out. They don't even know we've got an auxiliary engine on board."

"But look here," said Bobby. "Even if we get out and away, do you mean to say they won't telegraph to England to stop us?"

"On what charge? The only charge the Italian government can make against us is that we have antiques on board that have possibly been taken from Italian soil. Possibly, mind you. They can give no facts. If they have us arrested in England on a bare supposition—and I doubt if they can—and if that supposition proves false, what do they let themselves in for? It doesn't matter a button about Greece. Italy has no right to act for Greece. What we are being held here for is a mere suspicion that these are Italian works of art, which they aren't. It's good enough to hold us, but it's not good enough to set the cables working, arrest us in England, and lay the Italians open for a big bill for compensation owing to that arrest."

Bobby whistled.

"By Jove," said he, "there's something in this. If only——"

"What?"

"We can get out."

"I don't know whether we can get out or whether we can't," said Sam, "but I'm going to have a jolly good try."

Martia, sitting with her hands folded in her lap, rose to her feet.

"I feel we will," she said. "I feel luck is with us. We made our plans even before that man came on board, and we've got our water and stores. Luck is with us."

"Maybe," said Sam, touching the wood of the table.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE GREAT ATTEMPT

They came up on deck.

The great attempt could not be made for hours yet. Two hours before daybreak was the time settled by Sam, who knew that in a port or a city the hours before dawn find Vigilance most off her guard.

A boat had just come in, passing the Lorna Doone and making to berth at the place left vacant at the Silos Wharf by the Nederland liner that had put out in the afternoon. She was an Italian warship—a destroyer or big torpedo-boat. Fortunately she had not taken up moorings close to the Lorna, where she might have proved troublesome owing to the vigilance of her anchor watch. At the Silos Wharf she was safe, the distance being so great.

"That's another piece of luck," said Martia.

"And the wind is holding steady," said Sam. "It's backed a bit more to the east, and that's all to the good. Glass is rising. What's the time? Quarter to eleven. I'll go and have a talk to the hands, and I'd advise you two to try and get a bit of sleep."

He went for'ard, and the two others, after a few minutes, went below. Martia retired to her cabin and lay down.

The idea of sleep was absurd. She told herself that as she lay on her side, her eyes fixed on the panelling of the door. Even to put out the light was impossible.

The events of the day passed before her like the scenes in a cinematograph picture—passed and gave place to imaginary scenes from the future. Naples—should they fail to get away; a law court; a strange hotel where they would have to stop under surveillance; perhaps prison, for if they were caught in this attempt to escape she felt that things would go very much worse with them, so far as that pleasant little official in the gold-braided cap was concerned.

Was it wise? The question was dismissed as soon as asked. Any chance was better than the prospect before them. Actually she would have preferred the risk of drowning.

Noises came through the open port; the snorting of a passing tug, a confused sound that became stronger and turned into voices singing, mixed with the wheezing of an accordion. Italian sailors returning to some ship, happy and free. She closed her eyes, wondering who they were and where they were going to, and then she was running along a wharf in dreamland, the little Italian official running after her calling on her to stop; he was Behrens, and the wharf became Museum Street, and Behrens was showing her a Dutch doll he had bought at an art sale.... Then oblivion and a knock at the door.

"It's time for starting," came the voice of Sam. "Douse the lamp and come up."

Martia raised herself on her elbow, remembered everything in a flash, got out of her bunk, glanced at her hair in the mirror, and put on the cap she usually wore on deck. Then she put out the light and went into the saloon. Sam was there with a dark lantern in his hand. He saw her up the companion stairs and, closing the lantern, followed her on deck.

The harbour lay asleep beneath the stars. The lights of Genoa had vanished, except the street lamps and those at the entrance to the fort. One sound only broke the night—the far, everlasting, intermittent whistling of the shunting engines in the great station yard.

Bowler took the dark lantern from Sam and slipped below to attend to the engine. The anchor light was left burning. To have lowered it might have been to attract attention. In a harbour at night a light slowly changing place is scarcely noticeable unless to the eye of an attentive watcher, whereas a lowered light might draw to itself the most casual eye.

Sam took his place at the wheel, the girl beside him. He struck his heel once on the deck, and almost directly on the sound a clank and a splash told him that the anchor chain had gone.

Then came a moment of silence.

The Lorna was lying with her bow towards the breakwater, so that she had not to be turned until right on the fairway into the outer harbour. All the same, the seamanship involved in the business of getting out was of a nature highly trying to anyone but a man like Sam, used to ports and estuaries and a seaman by instinct. Two turns had to be taken; to port to clear the inner harbour, to starboard to clear the outer, and the star-stained darkness was deception itself to one judging distance.

Sam rapped twice on the planking with his heel, and Martia, scarcely breathing, heard the reply. The engine had started. Started with only speed enough to keep the propeller expanded. The Lorna did not seem to move.

She heard the rudder-chain click and saw the white hands on the wheel-spokes shift, but the Lorna seemed as stationary as though her anchor was still in the mud.

What was holding them? She dared not ask. She felt suffocating, her lips dry as pumice-stone, the palms of her hands wet with perspiration.

Then on the port bow she saw something dark that seemed drawing up to them. It was the mass of shipping moored to the quay of the outer harbour.

Yes, the Lorna was moving. The breakwater light was closer, and now the fairway was pushing aside the shipping and the quay and the outer harbour were on their port bow. The wheel went over and the Lorna turned, and now, as she softly glided across the star-sprinkled water with the shipping to port and the breakwater to starboard, the beam of the revolving light of the breakwater passed over them, sweeping the night rhythmically, like the wing of a ruby-coloured slowly flying bird.

Sam struck thrice with his heel on the planking, and the engine below sprang into full life. The bow wash whispered. The lighthouse moved as though some unseen finger were rapidly pushing it back, passed almost astern, and swung round to the starboard quarter as the helm went over and the bow pointed dead for the open sea.

"We're out," said Sam.

"Thank heaven!" said the girl.

"Out, and no wind," he grumbled.

Bobby, who had been forward, came aft.

"We've done them," said Bobby. "I was afraid you were going to ram the breakwater. Hackett, you're a jewel! Not another man could have done it like that. But the wind seems gone."

"Flat calm," said the skipper, altering the course a point or two. "Dog's luck, isn't it? Only wants the engine to give out and we're done."

Martia turned away from the grumblers and looked astern, where the revolving light was beckoning to them. A long way off it seemed now, beckoning and throwing its arms about as though ordering them back, whilst beyond it the lights of Genoa showed, a faint trace against the background on the hills.

Now, further away, the light seemed winking at them like a confederate.

Then, as she stood watching, it shifted its position, shining on the starboard quarter. Sam had altered the course, making no longer straight out to sea, but in a more westerly direction, as though steering for Albenga or Oneglia.

The Lorna Doone kept on her course bravely and in defiance of Fate and the wind. The engine, working to a charm, seemed to say, "Look at me. Trustable, aren't I? Without me where would you be? Plug, plug, plug—one hundred and twenty-five revolutions to the minute—plug, plug, plug." The demon that lives in auxiliary engines said not a word.

It was just on the point of sunrise, and Sam was handing the wheel to Atherfield, when the thudding of the engine slowed, hesitated, and stopped.

"Somethin' wrong with the injin, sir," came the voice of Bowler from below.

Something indeed was wrong with the engine. Sam, diving below, found Bowler on his knees before it in the attitude of a worshipper.

"It's the feed-pipe, I believe," said Bowler. "Unless it's one of the cylinders. She was working badly the last few minutes, and then she gave a cough and let out."

"How about the cylinder rings?" asked Sam. "Church said something about them when we were over there at that island. They wanted renewing or something."

"They were all right when I took her down yesterday," said Bowler, rising to his feet and scratching his head. "Me and Mr. Lestrange took her down and gave her a clean, and there was nothin' ailin' with her. Well, it's down, she'll have to be taken again. Is there no wind, sir?"

"No, confound it, not a breath! And this will mean hours. Well, it's got to be tackled and done at once. I'll send Church down to help."

He came on deck and gave the order, and then stood at the taffrail with the others, looking at the east.

It was an amazing spectacle that sunrise, for the sea out of which the sun was rising was smooth like an infinite sheet of glass. Away to the north and west lay the coast of Italy, the far mountains painted by the new-born light against the sky of aerial blue—the heavenly blue that the old Italian painters knew and caught in their pictures of angels and saints—whilst in all that world of sun-smitten glacial sea and purple coast there was not a sound, nor a wing, nor a sail.

Even Sam was held for a moment before turning to reach for the glass.

"Can't see any sign of Genoa," said he as he held the telescope to his eye. "It's hidden by the line of cape over there. We've made a good distance, but we've had the current with us. It's not much, but it's something, and we're moving with it now about as quick as a snail. Wind may come along after the sun's up a bit, but there's no telling."

"Hadn't we better raise the sail so's to catch it directly it comes?" asked Bobby.

"No," replied Sam. "We're less visible with bare sticks, and it won't take a minute to get the canvas on her when we want to. I'm going down to get some coffee."

Leaving Atherfield on the look-out, they went below for coffee and biscuits.

It was over this meal, accompanied by the sound of engine-tinkering, that Sam did what he ought to have done before.

"I didn't tell you," said he, "for it was only a suspicion, but nosing round the harbour yesterday evening I saw a boat that wasn't unlike the Santa Margharita."

"Visconti's?" said Bobby.

"Yes. It worried me a lot, for you remember at Hyalos, that night I dined with him——Well, we had a lot of fizz and that sort of thing, and, being off my guard, I may have said something that might have given him a hint of what we were doing. I do remember him asking what port I was going to call at next, and I said Genoa. How could I have known he was what we suspect him to be?"

"Oh, dear me," said Martia.

She saw the whole thing in a moment. Visconti coming to Hyalos for the same purpose that they had done, finding them, finding from Sam that they had been there a long time and had evidently cleared out the place, hurrying to Genoa to meet them, attempting through his agent Vanjour to get a share of the spoil and, failing in that, putting the Customs and police on to them, either from spite or, more likely, in the hope of a big reward.

There it was, plain enough, and there before her was the wretched Sam, and for a moment the anger in her mind seemed about to capture her tongue. She conquered it.

"Well," she said, "there is no use troubling now about it. What's done is done. You got us out, anyhow, and we are so far away now they won't be able to find us. And if they did, what could they do? You said we'd be safe beyond the three-mile limit."

"We're not really safe till we're home," said Sam. "I said if they captured us beyond the three-mile limit, we could apply to the British Consul, and put ourselves under his protection, that's all."

"And that would be as bad as anything else," said Bobby, "for then the whole affair would be out for the world to know."

They came on deck at a call from Atherfield. There was a trace of smoke on the sea over Genoa way. In the west a steamer had just disclosed herself, a great way off, making east, and to be disregarded.

Sam turned the glass towards Genoa.

"There are two craft out there," said he, "making either east or west. I can't tell for the moment."

He hung silent for a full minute, then he spoke:

"They're coming this way."

Martia's throat closed as though a hand had gripped it. Bobby took hold of the starboard rail.

"If we can see them, they can see us," said he.

Sam did not reply.

A minute and a half passed; then he handed the glass to Bobby.

"One's a small steamer of some sort," said he. "I believe the other is a warship, the rate she's making."

"Is she coming this way?" asked Martia.

"Yes," said Sam.

"I've got her," said Bobby. "She's stopped firing up. She's a destroyer, right enough. I believe she's the one we saw berthing last night at the wharf."

In a few minutes more they wanted no glass to see the oncomer. She was making dead for them, and covering the distance at a fine speed.

"That does us," said Bobby.

Martia turned away, sick at heart.

They might throw themselves on the protection of the British Consul. All the same, they had run away. Their position, British Consul or no British Consul, would be far worse than if they had stayed to face the music. The very fact of slipping out stealthily at night and making off was enough to condemn them. What a business! And all through the wretched Sam.

But she said nothing. She had agreed to make the attempt. If they had succeeded, everything would have been all right. It was a gambler's throw, foiled by the failure of the wind, by the failure of the engine, and by the chance that had brought this destroyer last night into Genoa Harbour.

Bobby lit a cigarette, and the unfortunate skipper went for'ard a bit, crossed his arms, and stood watching.

The destroyer was now only half a mile away. She was making twenty knots if an inch. They had plenty of time to observe her fully. Now the plume of foam at her stem could be seen, and her wireless outlined on the morning sky. The line of her course lay a bit to starboard of the Lorna, and now, close to, her size seemed to increase by leaps and bounds. Huge, she looked, and threatening and swift as a hawk. But why did she not check her speed?

The hum of her engines rushed up to them as she came abreast and passed them only a cable's length to starboard, without the officers on her bridge throwing them more than a glance, tossing them in her wash, and showing them her turtle stern and the foaming wake of her rushing propellers.

"Is she going to turn?" cried Bobby.

No; she showed no sign of altering her helm. Minute by minute she passed farther away across the blue morning sea, no longer a thing to be feared, no longer a warship—just a dot beneath a smudge of smoke.

Sam began to laugh unsteadily.

"She never was after us!" he cried. "Look at her! Lord, if she'd only known!"

"We've been fooling ourselves," said Bobby. "I know. I was in as blue a funk as you were. But what's the meaning of it? She's come from Genoa. She's the destroyer we saw berthed last night; that I'd swear. She can't have left port before they found we were gone. Well, if she's not after us, why isn't she?"

"What do you mean?" asked Martia.

"Just this: the port authorities must have discovered we were gone at daybreak, maybe before. They had a swift destroyer lying at the wharf. Well, don't you think they'd have used her to hunt for us? At all events, even if she were going on naval business—as she evidently is—don't you think they'd have asked her to overhaul us if met, put a crew on board, and wireless Genoa? Of course they would."

"Maybe," said Sam, who had recovered himself and was looking through the glass at the other vessel they had spotted coming from the direction of Genoa, and had forgotten in their excitement.

"Of course they would," said Martia. "Oh, good gracious, can it possibly be——"

"What?" asked Bobby.

"Can it possibly be——It is; I'm sure of it! We've been bluffed!"

Sam took the glass from his eyes and turned.

"How do you mean?"

"How do I mean? Why, can't you see? That little man in the gold cap wasn't a port official. He was fooling us. He was one of the Vanjour people. I thought there was something queer about him; he was far too civil."

"You mean to say that the chap who put us under arrest was bluffing?" cut in Bobby.

"I don't say anything; I only suspect. Look at the whole thing."

"But where would have been the sense of doing that? How would it have profited Vanjour and Visconti, if he is in this business, to send a chap like that just to fool us?"

"Remember," said Martia, "what he said. There was to be no fuss or unpleasantness. He was to call for us early this morning and we were all to go with him to Naples. Well, what would have happened if we hadn't been wise enough to put out? I can see what would have happened quite clearly. He would have come and taken us all ashore. The people on the quay would have noticed nothing wrong; just a party of people landing. We would have gone to the station and taken the train to Naples with him, and he would have vanished when we got to Naples, or perhaps before. We would have come back like a flock of geese, not daring to say a word to anyone, and found either the Lorna gone or the things. They could easily have been taken ashore, packed up; and we couldn't go to the police or say a word to anyone."

"Upon my word," said Bobby, "there seems something in that. But see here, the chap was in uniform."

"He had a gold band on his cap and brass buttons," replied Martia, "if you call that uniform—though it was good enough to fool us with."

"But would he have dared——"

"Why not? You know our position. Even if we had found he was a fraud, we could have said nothing."

"Well," said Sam, who had the glass still to his eye, "Whatever he was we'll soon find out, for, if I'm not mistaken, here's the Santa Margharita herself coming up."

He handed the glass to Bobby, who looked at the oncoming ship steering straight in their direction.

"I believe it's her," said he.

"I'm certain," said Sam. "And upon my soul," turning to Martia, "I believe you've struck the nail on the head. That destroyer has given the whole show away. This coffee-pot must have left the port the same time as she did. The coffee-pot's after us, and the Government boat isn't. It's as plain as a pikestaff."

"Think she's going to try and bluff us again?" asked Bobby.

"I don't know," said Sam. "You see, they've brought her into the open. She's no longer hidden among the shipping at Genoa. They'll know that we'll be sure to spot her as Visconti's boat. I believe Visconti is the head of this whole gang that's working against us. Wonder what he has up his sleeve now?"

Bobby was biting his nails. His memory still refused to render up where and when he had heard this name Visconti before. He only knew that he had heard it not long before the start and that it had been in some way or in some place connected with this expedition.

His reasoning mind told him that he must be right in this matter. The law of probability was entirely against the idea that Visconti had fitted out an expedition to ransack Hyalos and that his venture and theirs had clashed. No; Visconti, acting on the same information as theirs, had tried to forestall them. That was evident. And it was also evident that if he, Bobby, could remember where he had heard the name of this dark player, he might hold trump cards at once.

But memory could not clinch the matter.

The safest way to find a half-forgotten name or event is not to think too much about it, to forget it entirely, if possible, and then the subconscious mind, left in peace, goes through its files of documents and galleries of pictures and hands up all at once the desired thing to the conscious mind. Everybody knows that. Bobby knew it. But he did not know that his deep anxiety on the point and his desperate endeavours to solve it had probably so muddled the gnomes in his subliminal mind that they might never be able to help him now, unless some extra assistance came to their aid. They had been inhibited.

He stood watching the oncomer.

Yes, she was the Santa Margharita, or her twin. She came boldly on, impudent as she was dirty, so straight for them that they could not read the name on her bow, if any were there.

Then she slowed, and a few cables' lengths away reversed her propeller and dropped a boat.

"Here he is again," said Sam, who had levelled the glass at the boat. "Visconti? No. The port officer man, gold-laced cap and all. There's no sign of Visconti on the bridge or anywhere. Yes, it's the Santa Margharita. I can just catch the name as she swings." He shut the glass.

A cold hand laid itself on Martia's heart. What if they were wrong? What if the destroyer had come from some southern port beyond Genoa? What if this man in the gold-laced cap were no bluffer but Authority itself with power to drag them back?

Sam and Bobby were evidently asking themselves the same question. They stood silent, watching the boat draw on.

Sam ordered Bowler to throw the ladder down on the starboard side. The boat hooked on and over the rail like a monkey in his gold-laced cap, came the port man.

There was no smile on his face this time. He glanced round the deck, at the hands for'ard and the afterguard by the cabin companion-way. Then he nodded curtly to Sam.

"Below, please," said he, stepping forward and leading the way down the companion stairs as though he were the master of the ship.

In the cabin he took off his cap and laid it on the table, motioned the others to be seated, sat down himself, and took from his pocket a long envelope, which he laid on the table before him.

"Now we will talk business, Captain Hackett," said he. "In the port of Genoa we talked as friends, believing as I did that you were innocent men. You are all under arrest."

Martia gulped.

"You and the ship and the crew. You were foolish men to do what you have done, knowing that we, having your name and your ship's name, can stop all ports against you. You can go nowhere in the world, as you know, as a seaman. Every port would stop you. You must now take your ship back to Genoa Harbour. You must do it with your own men, as I have no men to give to help you. That is M. Visconti's boat, the gentleman who gave us the information about you. He is Italian Government official and his boat is Italian survey boat. Italian secret survey boat. That was how he found you, Captain Hackett. But enough. You must take your ship back to Genoa. I will leave a man with you in charge. But first, all those things must be transhipped to us. You have played us one trick, Captain Hackett, but not another. No, captain, not another shall you play."

It was Martia who began to see light vaguely.

"But why tranship the things?" asked she. Then, the light brightening as she noticed the look on the port officer's face, "Suppose," she went on, "you took those things on board the Santa Margharita and then streamed off without bothering to put a man on board us to take us back to Genoa?"

The gold-braided one hesitated and was lost. The truth came to Sam like a thunder-clap. He leaned across the table toward the other.

"You infernal scoundrel!" said Sam.

At the same moment he snatched the official looking envelope from the table and tore it open; there was nothing in it but a piece of blank paper.

"Close the cabin door," said Sam to Bobby.

The fraud at the table, with the gold-braided cap at his elbow, said absolutely nothing, did not seem perturbed, seemed thinking in an amused way over the situation.

Martia almost admired him.

"Now," said the captain of the Lorna Doone, sitting down before the other, "I don't know why I don't fling you overboard for your cheek. It would serve you right if we took you back to Genoa and handed you over to the Customs and police."

"On what charge, monsieur?" asked the other amiably.

"On the charge of impersonating them."

"Impersonating them—yes. And for what purpose?"

Sam was stumped. It would be impossible to tell the police or the Customs the purpose.

"So we will leave that matter alone," went on the other. "My name is Pirelli, monsieur, and we have been playing a game, you and I. You for your own hand, I for Monsieur Visconti, who has hired me. The game is not yet finished."

"Oh, isn't it?" said Sam.

"No, monsieur, not if I know anything of Monsieur Visconti. Let us talk, shall we?"

"Fire away," said Sam.

"Well then, it is this way," said Pirelli. "M. Visconti, a very powerful man in the art world, or so I believe, sent for me some days ago and said to me, 'Pirelli, I have heard of your fame as a secret service agent; I want your help in a matter of art.' He gave me my instructions. Your boat had not yet come to Genoa, but was expected. He gave me a free hand. I employed my assistant, Vanjour. He failed. Then at night I take the matter into my own hands, and board you in Genoa Harbour. And I would have succeeded, monsieur, had you not been an Englishman. No one but an Englishman would have had the courage to leave the harbour as you did."

The impudence of the man, and the extraordinary nature of this conversation, dazed Martia. She suddenly spoke.

"Tell me," she said. "Suppose you had succeeded and we had all gone with you, would you really have taken us to Naples?"

"Why yes, of course," replied Pirelli, as though he were talking of some perfectly natural transaction. "I would have left you all at the Hotel Amalfi or the Metropole. But I am, I hope, what you call a gentleman. You would have received that night a note telling you of the game that had been played on you, so that you might not be urged to go to the authorities making enquiries, and so getting involved. You would have returned to Genoa next day, to find your ship had been visited and the goods removed. Also you would have found at your ship-chandler's a letter with some money as compensation—your viatique, as they say at Monte Carlo—for I had made that a stipulation with M. Visconti."

"Don't talk of Monte Carlo," said Sam. "This was robbery——"

Pirelli put up his hand.

"Monsieur, if a seabird steal a fish from the sea, and a bigger seabird steal that fish from him, which is the robber? Make yourself clear on this point. We could not have moved against you if these marbles, which you have taken from the waters of Hyalos, had been your property, bought and paid for. I do not call you a robber for taking these things from there, so do not call us robbers for attempting to take them from you. It is all a game, nothing more."

"So you know about Hyalos?" said Sam.

"M. Visconti told me all. Also that you had given him to understand that you had been at Hyalos a long time, and had taken everything worth taking."

"I never——" cried Sam.

Pirelli held up his hands.

"Excuse me, captain. I will give you what you said to M. Visconti. M. Visconti asked you what you had been doing, and you told him you had been fishing. He asked you what you had been fishing for, and you told him you had been fishing for gods, and that you had got all the gods worth having out of the place. Of course he knew. He had come himself to find marbles. He had gone to great expense in fitting his expedition. He found you had been before him, and taken all worth taking. You told him you were going to Genoa. Well, can you wonder that he tried to make you disgorge? I would not tell you all this, only that you can do nothing to me. You are just the same as us, captain; no better, no worse. Now I have a deal to propose to you, and for your own good. Last night, if you remember, I made you show me all the things you have on board. I took an inventory of them in my own mind, and that inventory is in the possession of M. Visconti."

"Confound you!" said Sam.

"No, no, captain. It was all in the way of business. Well, these things are worth money; many thousands of pounds. You are full of treasure, captain, and M. Visconti is empty. Now I propose you make a deal, a play for safety. You have an Aphrodite, the one you showed me. I propose you hand her over to me to take back to M. Visconti as a—what you call a sop in the pan. It will stop his mouth and hold his hands."

"Never!" said Sam.

"One moment, captain," put in the other. "This is not for myself that I am talking, but for you. If Visconti not get something, he make trouble for you. I am not his agent speaking this, but just a sensible man who is not unfriendly to you. Now see you here, Captain Hackett. I am Pirelli, of the Piazza Aqua Verde, Genoa. I am an agent that undertakes delicate matters, but I always work within the law. You may say that what I did last night, in bluffing you and trying to seize these marbles for M. Visconti, was not within the law. You are mistaken. I was only trying to recover from you M. Visconti's property."

"His property?" said Sam.

"A moment, captain. Before moving in this matter I required and received from M. Visconti a document stating that these things were his property, and empowering me to get them back for him by what means I could. I dictated that document to him. It does not matter to me in the least what truth there is in it; what matters to me is that it clears my hands. I am only his agent acting on certain advice, and under Italian law nothing can be done to me acting as agent for him with such a document in my hand. Under Italian law you could sue me for taking these things from you by what you might call a trick, but under Italian law you would have first to prove that they were yours. Which you could not do. You see, captain? I was a very cautious man."

"Maybe," said Sam. "But I think you are also a dashed scoundrel, if you'll excuse me for saying so."

"No, captain, not more than yourself. It is all a game of gambling, nothing more. We are all playing with the loaded dice, nothing more. In what I am saying to you now, I am quite honest. Beware of M. Visconti. He is a dangerous man; he feels himself to have been done in this deal, and he will have his revenge, as the gamblers say. Take my advice, captain, and cut off his hands. Give him this Aphrodite and keep the rest. There is such a thing as hush-money, captain, and it is very useful money. It buys silence, which is sometimes better than gold, as your English proverb says."

Sam turned to the others.

"Have I a free hand to deal in this matter?" asked he of Bobby and Martia.

"Yes," said Bobby, "I'll leave it to you, Sam."

Martia agreed.

"Good," said Pirelli, "now we talk sense. This is my position, captain; for what I have done in this case I have been paid, but I do not hide it from you I get a commission as well on what I can secure from you. On the Aphrodite I would get my commission. You see I am straight with you. But leaving that to one side, as a man to a man, I advise you to buy the silence and the friendship of M. Visconti by this concession. There, I have said it."

Martia watched with interest to see how Sam would react to this temptation.

He sat seemingly lost in thought for a minute. Then he spoke.

"Tell Visconti from me," said Sam, "that if he had acted as a gentleman I would have given him not only the Aphrodite, but half of the other things we have on board, seeing that we crabbed his expedition. Tell him that he invited me on board his ship as a guest and outraged the laws of hospitality by using what I said in conversation with him for his own ends and to my disadvantage. Got that down? Tell him I would sink my ship with all on board, or run it on the rocks, or hand it over to the Customs, before I would let him profit by his conduct to me. And tell him," finished Sam, "that he can go to the devil for all I care, that I am running this show for no profit for myself but entirely for two friends, and that I have only two ambitions; one is to see it safely through, and the other is to kick him. That's all."

"That's right; that's splendid," said Martia enthusiastically.

"Ah well, ah well," said Pirelli, seeing the game was up, "it is all very unfortunate. You will not take my advice. I can do no more. Well, captain, a pleasant voyage to you, and one word in your ear from a friend to a friend; beware of M. Visconti. I see you will not deal at all and I am not saying this to frighten you, for you are a brave man and not to be treated as a child. The affair now leaves me. I have acted for M. Visconti as best I could. I receive my payment and everything is done as far as Alfredo Pirelli is concerned. But I give you this piece of advice as a present: beware of M. Visconti."

He rose, bowed to Martia, and went on deck.

CHAPTER XXVIII

WEST

They watched him row off to the Santa Margharita.

It was still a flat calm, and the Santa Margharita lay, the looking glass of the sea mirroring her ugliness, and a slight swell rolling her to show her foul copper sheathing.

They saw Pirelli go on board and vanish below. A minute later the water poured at her stern, and they heard the tramp of her engine.

"She's making off back to Genoa," said Sam. "I wonder if Visconti is on board."

"Most likely," replied Bobby. "And I wonder would it have been better to have given him something to keep him quiet."

"You mean the Aphrodite?"

"Yes."

"Well, that's a thing I couldn't do," replied Sam. "It's not only that the chap played me such a dirty trick. It's just this: If I had consented to a thing like that, it would have been practically going partners with him. I draw the line at that. If we are caught we are at least caught playing our own game and not confederates of a rogue like that."

"That's just how I feel," put in Martia, "and I think it was splendid the way you turned him down straight without a moment's hesitation."

Bobby felt out of count. He also felt that he was figuring in Martia's eyes as a somewhat sordid person ready to buy safety at too high a price. All the same, he did not draw back from the position he had taken, though he said nothing more as he stood watching the last of the Santa Margharita vanishing now beyond the cape that hid Genoa.

The calm still held the Lorna in its grip. If Visconti, turning vicious, chose to apprise the Genoese port authorities, nothing could be easier than for the Customs to send a fast launch out and capture the Lorna where she lay. She was beyond the three-mile limit, but port authorities don't bother about the fraction of a mile, and there are no mile-stones, anyway, to show exactly where the limit begins.

"All the same," said Bobby, "I believe we will have trouble with that chap yet. From what we know of him, he seems to be an extremely wily bird, and he's got power behind him. Anyway, he's able to do things. Look at his record. He gets word of Hyalos by some chance. He fits out the Margharita. He engages those sponge-fishers from Ægina to meet him there. He comes to Hyalos and finds us on the spot. He gets you, Sam, on to his ship and hypnotises you with the aid of champagne into telling him the whole of our business. I'm not rubbing it in, Sam, I'm just showing you the man we have to deal with. What does he do then? Fancying that we have scooped everything of value in Hyalos he vanishes, to swoop on us at Genoa in the form of Pirelli. We have escaped for a moment, but it's my opinion we haven't done with him yet."

"I don't see what he can do now," replied the skipper; "unless he goes back now and gives the show away to the harbour people at Genoa. Even then he'd have to get a warrant to arrest us. That all takes time. Anyhow, once we are clear away from here we're safe."

"How about England? It will take us three weeks to get home, and he can get there in two days from here, overland."

Sam did not reply to this. His eyes had caught sight of something far away to the east, a dulling of the water beyond the sea dazzle. It was the wind.

In a moment the Lorna was alive again, the hands hauling on the halyards and the great mainsail rising like a kite to the blue; the gaskets were cast off the jib, and Sam sprang to the wheel as the forefoot of the breeze struck them, and the banging of blocks and the creak of cordage sounded as the main boom lifted and shifted, sweeping across the deck to starboard, the sail filling and tugging at the sheet.

The Lorna sprang away like a spurred horse.

When the east wind comes like that in the Mediterranean, after a calm, it blows.

The Lorna was running almost rail under. Down below, things that had not been secured were fetching away, and Sam, for a moment, was in two minds about reducing sail. But he held on.

Then the first great booming gusts flattened down into a strong, steady sailing wind, and handing the wheel over to Bowler, he turned to talk to the others.

They were safe, for the moment at least. With the start they had, and the speed they were making, no boat out of Genoa would overhaul them before they had cleared Italian waters. Later that afternoon, away to starboard, the Maritime Alps showed the spur they push towards Oneglia, and that night, hauling closer inshore, they saw a spray of light through the night glass, a glittering ribbon—the lights of Monte Carlo.

At dawn, in cloudless weather, Antibes showed away on the starboard quarter; then Cape Camarat loomed across the blue, and far ahead the islands of Hyères beckoned to them, rose from the sea, and sank behind them. Whatever they had done at Hyalos they had not offended the gods who preside over the winds of the Mediterranean, for the wind from the east and south of east never failed them. It held true and hard and steady as they passed the Balearics and gave Cape Nao the good-bye, pursued them, laughing and shouting, past Cape Palos; showed them the cold, white ridges of the Sierra Nevada on the northern sky-line, chased them at last through the straits into the arms of the gods who rule the Atlantic.

Then things became different, with a dirty sky and head winds against which they had to fight from St. Vincent to Finisterre.

Then the Bay of Biscay played with them for five long days, with light and variable winds and a ground swell that seemed to have come up from Cape Horn.

Ushant passed them on into a fog, and the chance of being rammed by everything turning that villainous corner. Then the fog, like a suddenly raised dish-cover, lifted, and behold they were in a world of east wind, blue sky, and hard, emerald sea; a cold, bright beautiful world with winter-locked England a line on the horizon to port.

Then came the Dorset coast, and next morning at dawn the Isle of Wight far ahead, the Needles light just winking out, and Poole Harbour only four or five hours' sail away.

Down in the cabin, over an early breakfast, with the deck in charge of Bowler, Sam gave it as his opinion that, barring some catastrophe unimagined and inconceivable, the expedition was over and a success.

"Unless," put in Bobby, "that beast of a Visconti doesn't play us some last trick."

"There's only one trick he can play us," said Sam, "and that's Customs. And I know the Customs men at Poole. And, besides, this has nothing to do with Customs, although the Government, if they were to be applied to by the Greek Government, might use the Customs to collar the things pending investigations. I don't believe that trouble will arise."

"Well, suppose it doesn't?" asked Bobby. "What are we to do with the things when we arrive? We've got to get them ashore and put them somewhere till we are able to see Behrens and ask how they are to be disposed of."

"I thought of that only yesterday," replied the other. "I asked Bowler did he know of any place handy for storing things. And there's a cottage close to his that's empty. We can shove them there. They'd be safe as houses whilst we run up to Town, for he'll be there to look after them."

A couple of hours later, as they stood on deck, the sandbanks showed ahead, and the entrance to the great harbour, lying idle, wrapped in its winter sleep.

Only gulls greeted them as they came in, gulls from Brownsea Island and the slob lands and sandbanks, crying and creaking on the cold east wind, flying across the cloudless blue against which stood Corfe Castle in the far distance.

Sam steered, with Bowler for'ard on the look-out; Bobby and the girl standing by, as they picked their way by the sea marks that showed the road to Poole town.

Martia, wrapped in a heavy coat of Sam's, scarcely spoke a word. They were home at last, safe home, and against that background of winter land and flying gulls the whole remembered picture of the last few months seemed unbelievable. They were home with everything they had started to do accomplished. Home, with no one to greet them but the gulls.

The tide was coming in with them, gurgling against the stakes and sea-marks. The Sandfly showed close at her anchorage, snugged down for winter, and near the Sandfly a barge swung, turning to the tide on her chain, dead and cheerless-looking as a coffin. And now the quay of Poole, with an old brig moored alongside, could be clearly seen, even to its bollards, but with not a soul moving on it.

"Ready there with the anchor?" came Sam's voice.

Then, a moment later, the call to let go, a splash, and the rattle of the chain, and the Lorna Doone swung to her moorings, the canvas slatting in the wind, and the long voyage over.

And still not a soul on the shore to see them or a voice to greet them.

Bowler, Church, Atherfield, and Glastonbury, as indifferent to the whole business as Poole itself, dropped below to get their dunnage together, after having stowed the canvas.

Sam lit a pipe.

"Well, here we are," said Sam. "I said she was a beauty, and she is."

"Who?" asked Martia, astonished at this cryptic remark.

"Who? Why, the Lorna. Close-hauled or going with the wind she's not to be beaten."

"That's so," said Bobby; "and look."

A figure showed on the quay. It came along to the boat steps, got into a scow that was moored there, and pushed off, rowing towards them.

It was Bowler's brother.

Not a word of welcome as he came alongside, scarcely a nod. They might have just come back from a sail in the Solent for all the emotion exhibited by Bowler's brother on their return.

"Hallo!" said Sam.

"Hallo!" answered the brother of Bowler.

"I'll be wanting you to help us take some things on shore," said Sam.

"Right y'are," said the longshoreman, taking in his oars and tying up to a channel-plate, whilst the fo'c'sle crowd came up from below with their bags.

Bowler himself came last.

"When I've got the chaps ashore, sir," he said, "I'll come back to do any cleanin'-up there's to be done, and to help you ashore with them bits of things. Glastonbury's willin' to stay and look after the ship till this evenin', if you're wantin' him."

"Right," said Sam. "I'll pay you off to-night at the inn. Tell them we'll be coming off in an hour or so, and we'll be staying the night, and we'll want dinner. I'll want you to come on board this evening when Glastonbury goes and stay as watchman. We'll get some of the things off before dark and the rest in the morning. Church, I'll want you to help us. Go off and see your wife now, but I'll want you at four o'clock."

"Right, sir," said Church.

Then the crew, getting into the boat—but not before Martia had shaken hands with each one of them—pushed off, the boat having orders to return in an hour.

"'Them bits of things,'" quoted Martia with a laugh. "Could we have found a port in the whole world safer than here—for our purpose?"

"No," said Bobby, "we couldn't."

CHAPTER XXIX

VISCONTI

Landing an hour later, after a hurried luncheon on board, and leaving Glastonbury to look after the ship, the adventurers made for the inn, engaged rooms, and then, under the guidance of Sam, turned in the direction of the Bournemouth Road, where Bowler's cottage was situated.

Sam knew the place. He knew nearly everyone in Poole, and where they lived, and how. He knew that Bowler had paid for his cottage and for the one adjoining which he had bought last summer out of the profits of the herring fishery, and which he intended to furnish and let in the summer to come.

"A lucky thing it's empty," said Sam, as he led the way. "Once we have the things here it's only a question of a motor-lorry to shift them when we know where Behrens wants them taken to. I'll get Taylor to bring his cart down to the quay at four o'clock to bring them up here."

"Won't people suspect?" asked Martia.

"Lord, no! It's me, you see. Besides, there's nothing to suspect. It's only crockery ware and curiosities we have brought from abroad. Joynson—he's the Customs man—knows me, and I'll have a talk with him. Here we are."

He stopped at a cottage on the right of the road.

"Here's the place," said he. "Bowler's is just beyond. Wait, and I'll get the key from him."

He went off, and returned in a minute with the key, opened the door, and they went in.

It was a five-roomed cottage, counting the kitchen; clean and dry and empty of everything but a sack of potatoes reposing by the fireplace of the front room.

Carrying the key with them, they went to the post-office to send a wire to Behrens, announcing their safe arrival. Then they returned to the inn.

Entering, they almost ran into the arms of a tall black-bearded man who was coming out, his hat on the back of his head and a cigarette between his lips.

It was Visconti! Sam recognised him at once, and whispered the name to the others.

The inn coming crashing down before their eyes, or even on the top of their heads, would scarcely have surprised them more.

And it was a double surprise, for Visconti did not try to avoid them, did not seem startled. He recognised Sam with a smile that had something of mockery in it, raised his hat to the girl, and passed out without a word and with the cigarette still between his lips.

"Well, I'm dashed!" said Sam.

Martia, who had only seen Visconti through the glass at Hyalos, turned to Sam.

"You are sure it's he?" she asked.

"Yes," said Sam.

She turned to the office, behind the window of which the manageress of the inn was seated, doing accounts.

"Is that tall gentleman who has just gone out staying here?" she asked.

"Yes," replied the manageress. "He has been here some days."

"May I ask his name?"

"He is Mr. Visconti."

Martia thanked the woman, and, turning to her companions, led the way into the coffee-room, which was empty.

CHAPTER XXX

CORNERED

A bright fire was burning in the grate. Without a word she drew a chair towards it and sat down, whilst Bobby and Sam took their seats, one at the side of the table, the other on the couch by the door.

For half a minute none of them spoke.

It was Martia who broke the silence.

"He has been here waiting for us," said she. Then turning to Sam: "You must have told him that the boat came from Poole. I don't blame you. It was just the thing one might say in conversation, and you did not know he was a rogue."

"I blame myself," said Sam. "No, I didn't know he was a rogue, but I shouldn't have had all that champagne and stuff. I've let you two down. Well, there it is."

He crossed his arms.

"Yes," replied Martia. "There it is, and there's no use crying over spilt milk. The question is, what are we to do? I don't like the thing at all. He comes here to wait for us, conceals nothing, not even his name, and meets us like that with a smile, knowing quite well that we know all about his hand in the Genoa business. You remember Pirelli's warning to beware of what he might do? I feel that he is a terribly dangerous man and a terribly clever one. I would much rather he had concealed himself and tried to steal the things from us by a trick, as he did at Genoa."

Sam uncrossed his arms, and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

Bobby rose and came to the fire, leaning on the mantelpiece.

"You're right," he said. "He must have something up his sleeve or he wouldn't be acting openly as he is."

"He has nothing up his sleeve," said Sam, talking as though he were addressing the pattern on the carpet. "It's just this: we can't fight him, and he knows it. Our business is shady; that's his strength."

"But why didn't he speak to us?"

"I don't know. We've got to wait and see. We'll leave the first move to him, and I'll go on getting the stuff on shore. I'm not going to be stopped by him, or show that we are a bit afraid."

"All the same," said Bobby, "if we bring any of the stuff on shore to-night, I'll sleep in the cottage with it."

"Yes," said Sam. "Either you or I will keep watch, and we'll have news from Behrens in the morning what to do about it. You'd better drop him a note this evening giving him details."

At four o'clock, Bowler turning up, they put off to the Lorna. Sam had obtained hampers for the packing of the vases. This work and the transportation of the things to the cottage took them until eight o'clock, when they returned to the inn for supper, leaving Bowler on guard at the cottage. Glastonbury had consented to stay on board the ship for the night as watchman.

There was no sign of Visconti at the inn. They found from the waiter that he had dined at six o'clock and gone to Bournemouth; to the theatre.

It was an unfortunate day for the expedition, and a still more unfortunate day for Bobby. At nine o'clock, leaving the others in the coffee-room, he went out to smoke a pipe, taking his way along the quays by the light of a nearly full moon. Away across the harbour water he could see the anchor-light of the Lorna Doone, and beyond her the ghostly silhouette of the Sandfly at her moorings; but he was thinking neither of ships nor of the expedition just completed, nor of the beauty of the cold, clear winter's night. He was thinking of Martia.

He was free now, free to say to her what he wanted to say, to tell her what she must have guessed by this—that she was the only woman in the world so far as he was concerned. She had never given him what one might call encouragement; they had been shipmates and friends, that was all; but he knew, or fancied he knew, that all would be right. The only thing holding him back was his position. If things turned out well, if Behrens were able to dispose of the marbles taken from Hyalos, his worldly position would be assured. They were worth a very large sum, perhaps fifty thousand pounds, perhaps more. The energy and activity of Visconti in the matter was a guarantee of their worth, and he, Bobby, was to receive half the profits. Sam had always definitely refused to share, though, when it came to the point, Bobby had determined to make him share. Leaving that aside, if things went well, Bobby would be well off; if they went the other way he would be as poor as when they started.

He was not the man to ask a woman to share his poverty. No. He could say nothing to Martia till the money was secure, and that could not be till Visconti was defeated in whatever plans he had made against them, and until Behrens had written his cheque and the cheque was cashed.

He turned from the end of the wharf into a mean street that led him by big warehouses to a path that opened on to the Bournemouth Road. Poole, that once prosperous shipping port, is, especially on a winter's night like this, a town of the dead. Not a soul did he meet on his way, and the road beneath the moon showed nothing but a light from Bowler's cottage and, as he drew closer, Bowler himself smoking a pipe on guard outside.

He gave the old sailor good-night and, returning to the inn, knocked his pipe out in the porch.

He felt suddenly easy in his mind. The deserted town, the fact that Bowler was on guard at the cottage, and that Glastonbury was taking charge of the Lorna, conspired to create this feeling. All would be well. There was nothing to fear. This was England, not Italy, and Visconti, whatever he might attempt, would fail. As he came into the lighted hall his spirits had risen to the point of exultation.

He was fey.

He put his hat on the rack, and came towards the coffee-room.

Now, the coffee-room of the Anchor is situated at the end of a short passage floored with thick matting that takes a footstep without a sound. The coffee-room door was a bit open, and as he reached it a voice broken made him pause; Sam's voice, broken with emotion:

"I swear to you, Martia, I will never commit that foolishness again. Never again. I have done with drink of any sort for ever—if you will only believe me."

And Martia's voice:

"I believe you, and I will trust you. I would have said nothing about it, only that marriage is a thing more serious even than life—it is the lives of two people for always and always."

Then a sound as though Sam were snivelling and the girl comforting him.

Bobby turned and stole away. He came into the hall and went to the hat-rack, put on his hat, absolutely unconscious of what he was doing, stood for a moment as if undecided, and then stumbled up the stairs to his bedroom.

So that was it. Martia was engaged to Sam. Not only in love with him, evidently, but engaged to him. He walked the room with his hat still on his head, recognising the plain fact yet unable to accommodate his mind to it.

Then slowly, and little by little, the monstrousness of the whole business began to piece itself together like the picture that makes a jig-saw puzzle.

This pair had never shown the least sign of mutual attachment from start to finish of the voyage—if Sam's lapses from sobriety were left out of count. Then immediately after landing they were carrying on like this!

At the beginning of things, when they had first met, it was evident that they had known each other before; but they had said not one word of recognition. He remembered how Sam had shaved off his beard when he had heard that Martia was joining them.

Bobby, trying to think, sat down on the side of his bed and took off his hat, flung it in a corner of the room, and nursed his knee.

From the very first there had been a mystery in their relationship; yet the solution of that mystery—mutual love masked and hidden—was antagonistic to all he knew about them and their relationship on the voyage. Yet there was no way of refusing it.

"I believe you and I will trust you. I would have said nothing about it, only that marriage is a thing more serious even than life."

When a girl talks like that to a man and comforts him when he snivels, what more is to be said? Well, there was one good thing, anyhow. Now that he knew how things lay, he was saved from making a fool of himself by asking Martia to marry him. This thought, however, brought little comfort.

The iron had literally entered his soul. He had not known the intensity and power of his love for this girl till now that it had been stricken down, a thing ruined yet living still—ruined yet living still.

He rose and opened the window and looked into the night, telling himself that whatever happened in the future, nothing mattered now.

CHAPTER XXXI

BEHRENS

If the body had not the power to accommodate itself to injuries, and the mind to disasters and the tricks of Fate, the world would be depopulated in a hundred years or inhabited only by cripples.

Bobby awoke next morning feeling as a man might feel who has suddenly lost a limb, but determined all the same to carry on, keep a stiff upper lip, and say nothing.

All the same he avoided the others, going without breakfast and turning up only when the work began, at ten o'clock.

Sam and Martia found him waiting on the quay by the boat slip.

Sam looked at him curiously.

"Where on earth have you been?" he asked. "We waited breakfast nearly a quarter of an hour for you."

"I had a beastly headache," said Bobby, "and went for a walk. Have you seen anything of Visconti?"

"Not a sign," replied the other. "But he's in the hotel. I asked the maid, and she told me he came back late last night from Bournemouth and was breakfasting in his own room. Then half an hour later, just as we were coming down here, I got this from him. Read it."

He handed a sheet of letter-paper to Bobby, who read:

"Mr. Visconti would be glad of an interview with Captain Hackett and his companions. Would twelve o'clock—here, in Mr. Visconti's sitting-room—suit Captain Hackett? A verbal reply will suffice."

"What did you say?" asked Bobby.

"I said 'yes.'"

"You were right. It's better to see the bounder and have it out with him. Anyhow, we've forced him to make the first move. There's been no letter or wire from Behrens yet?"

"None," said Sam. "I think it highly probable Old Man Behrens will bundle into the train and come down himself instead of writing. I wish he were here now, that we might consult him."

Martia, who had taken her seat on a bollard, looked up.

"I wonder would it be any use sending a telegram to Mr. Behrens to come at once," said she, "and putting off the interview with Visconti till the evening?"

"No," said Sam, after a moment's thought, "I don't like putting him off. I've a feeling we ought to get to grips with him at once. Besides, it would be a sign of weakness. What could Behrens do, anyway? No, we've got to fight this thing ourselves. Anyhow, there's a chance that Behrens may turn up before twelve. He got our wire yesterday and he hasn't answered it." He looked at his watch. "Confound Bowler! Why hasn't he turned up? It's gone ten."

"Let's go and fetch him," said Bobby.

They left the quay and came by the side lane on to the Bournemouth Road, where they found Bowler, who had just left his cottage. As they met him a taxi-cab coming from Bournemouth drew up, the door flung open, and out bundled a little old man with a brown bag in his hand. It was Behrens.

His keen eyes had spotted the group in the road and recognised Bobby and the girl.

"It's Mr. Behrens!" cried Martia, moving towards him. "Oh, how fortunate!"

"I got the early train. It didn't come farther than Bournemouth, so I had to take a cab," said the old fellow, giving his bag to Bobby and feeling in his pocket for the money to pay the taxi man. "There's your fare and sixpence over. No, I'll walk to the inn, wherever it is. And now let's look at you," said he, holding Martia a bit away from him. "Knew I was right. You're a different person. Nothing like a sea voyage after all. Different person. Brought any things?"

"Heaps," cut in Bobby. "We've got some of the stuff ashore, vases mostly, but the best of them are still on board the ship."

"Then let's go to the ship and look at them," said Behrens.

"But don't you want some breakfast?" asked the girl.

"Breakfasted on the train," replied the art dealer. "And what do you call the best of them?"

"Marbles," said Bobby. "I think you'll be pleased when you see them. I couldn't say much in my letter from Genoa, but you'll see."

They reached the quay, where the boat was tied up to the steps, and, rowed by Bowler, they put off for the Lorna.

Behrens said nothing on the way across. The consuming passion of his life had him in its grip. Marbles! What might not that word, so capable of magic interpretation, mean now? Marbles from the mystic city of Hyalos. Marbles perhaps from the chisel of Praxiteles. He scrambled on board, nearly losing his hat as he did so but still dumb. Still voiceless, he followed them below, and mute as a fish he stood while in the after-cabin Martia gently removed the bunk coverlet from the smiling Aphrodite, the far-gazing, beautiful figure on the face of which seemed to lie like a veil the sunlight of the Golden Age.

Breathing deeply and swallowing hard, Behrens helped the others to raise her and rest her standing against the bunk edge, and then, and only then, drawing back and folding his hands, he found voice, murmuring to himself, talking in his beard, lost to everything but the vision before him.

"You are pleased?" asked Martia.

"There is none other like her," said Behrens, speaking like a man in a dream. "Beside her the Milo is a woman."

Then, with one long last look, he turned and went into the main cabin, followed by the others, who led him to where the rest of the marbles waited inspection.

A quarter of an hour later, a business man again and seated at the cabin table, Behrens, a cigarette between his lips, was being introduced to the skeleton in the cupboard of the expedition—that is to say, the subject of Visconti.

It was Sam who did the talking, hiding nothing, and the art dealer, whose life had been spent in a struggle with rogues and scoundrels, sat listening to the recital, apparently unmoved, with scarcely a question. But Martia noticed something in his face that she had never seen before, something grim, almost repellent; something that seemed to alter the colour of his eyes, maybe by broadening the pupils. This was a new Behrens, different from the kindly and almost fatherly individual she had known from childhood.

She had never seen Behrens in one of his great auction fights, fronting the hounds of the art-dealing world; she had never seen him up a tree with an old missal or a Benvenuto Cellini vase under his arm, and the wolves of the trade leaping for him with their bids, he always climbing higher; she had never seen him, in fact, with his teeth bared for fight and the ugly part of his nature in command.

"And this gentleman," said Behrens, "is now at the inn waiting to receive you and blackmail you at twelve o'clock?"

"That's about the size of it," said Sam.

"And he offered, through this man Pirelli, to say nothing if you would hand him over the Aphrodite?"

"Yes."

"H'm," said Behrens, and relapsed into thought.

"All the same," put in Bobby, "I don't believe he can do anything."

"I beg your pardon?" said Behrens. "How do you mean?"

"I don't believe he can hurt us if we tell him frankly to go to the devil."

"He has gone there long ago," said Behrens. "And you are mistaken. He can cause trouble. Now this is how we are placed. It is not a question of money for me. You have recovered these things for me, and on the information given to you by me, and I have financed the expedition. I intend to pay you, Mr. Lestrange, one-half of what I consider to be their value. I had intended selling these things at a profit, but, now that I have seen them, all that is gone. I will never sell these things. They are so lovely that they are part of my life. At my death they will go to the world with the story of how they were obtained, giving none of your names, just saying where and how I got them.

"It will be the fitting postscript to the life of an art-dealer who loved art more than money. There will be much talk, much fighting over these things when I am dead. The Greek Government will have its say, the English Government, too. But they, the lovely things, will remain, whatever Government gets them, with my name attached to them for ever. That will be my little monument erected not to me so much as to the fact that I salved these things from the sea and gave them to the world.

"Now, if you had brought home inconsiderable things, even though valuable, I would say to Mr. Visconti, 'Dog, take your bone and be silent.' But the case is different. I must deal differently with Mr. Visconti. He asked you to be with him at twelve o'clock. Well, you must send your man now to the inn and ask him to be with you at twelve o'clock. Tell him to come here to this ship, interview him in this cabin, and I will be in that little cabin with the door half-shut. I will hear what he has to say, and—leave the rest to me. I believe I will be able to say a word after I hear what line he is talking. I was not born yesterday, Mr. Lestrange, and my life has been spent very much in a continual struggle with rogues."

"Will he come?" said Sam.

"You must send and tell him to come," replied Behrens. "I would not write. Just send your man with the word."

"He'll come all right," said Bobby. "He's cool enough to do anything. Tell Bowler to say you are sorry you can't go to the inn, as you are busy, but that you will be glad if he'll come to the ship. He knows most of our men are on shore, so he'll not fear us kidnapping him or anything like that. He'll come right enough."

Sam went on deck and gave the message to Bowler, who took it ashore. Then, between them, they lifted the Aphrodite back into the bunk and covered her with the quilt.

Ten minutes later Martia, who had gone on deck to prospect, came down with the news that Visconti had evidently accepted the invitation, as he was coming down the quay to the boat.

"And now," said Behrens, "not a word as to me. I will just listen to this gentleman who is coming off so boldly, thinking that the trump cards are his. Well, well, we shall see."

He went into the after cabin and half closed the door.

CHAPTER XXXII

A GREAT ART DEALER

Visconti, as he came on board, found Bobby waiting to receive him.

"I have come——" said Visconti.

"I know," cut in Bobby. "You have come to see Mr. Hackett. Follow me, please."

He led the way down to the cabin, where Martia was sitting on the couch and Sam standing by the table.

Sam nodded curtly to the visitor and pointed to a seat. Martia did not even incline her head. She sat looking at this man who had been pursuing them for so many weeks, looking at him and wondering, for Visconti seemed completely and entirely at his ease, and, as he sat down and placed his hat on the floor beside him, might have been a friend, or at all events some visitor paying a friendly call.

It was Sam who opened the business.

"I didn't see you at Genoa," said Sam, "but I saw your agent, Pirelli. I daresay he told you what I said about you. Well, what's your business?"

"Quite simple, captain," replied Visconti. "It has to do with your cargo. One word. You feel aggrieved that, coming to Hyalos as I did with an expedition costing much money, only to find that you had forestalled me—you feel aggrieved, I say, that, this being so, I have done what I have done. Well, I will explain."

"You never can explain away the fact that you asked me to dinner to pump me of information," replied Sam. "There is a lady present, so I can't tell you in plain English what I think of that business. However, go on."

"I will go on," replied the other, quite unmoved. "I make no apologies. Business is business, and in this world, captain, there is no such thing as friendship in business."

"There's honour."

"Perhaps," replied Visconti. "But we will not talk of honour in a question that has to do with stolen antiques."

"Stolen?" cried Sam.

"Shut up, Sam!" cut in Bobby. "Don't lose your temper. Yes, Mr. Visconti, go on. Stolen antiques, you were saying."

"Precisely," replied Visconti. "Stolen antiques. Though, believe me, I do not wish to press that point on you more than just to touch you with it."

"Like the point of a dagger," said Bobby. "With a threat that the dagger will be driven home if we don't consent to share the swag."

"The illustration is highly coloured, but not without verisimilitude." Visconti smiled. "Now let us talk like reasonable men. Stolen is a nasty word. I do not believe that either of you gentlemen would consent to theft in the ordinary acceptation of the word. Nor would I. But you have done what I would have done had I been able. You have taken from the sea those things that belong to no man, but to which a certain Government might lay claim."

"No Government could claim them," said Sam, "any more than they could claim the fish swimming in Hyalos Bay. These things belonged only to the men who owned them, and they've been dead two thousand years."

"No doubt," said Visconti. "But all the same—and you know it quite well, captain—if I were to give this information an embargo would be laid on these things pending enquiry and the decision of the courts. The law would take them into its hand and years would be spent in litigation. You would win your case, perhaps, but you would be ruined with the expenses. That is so, captain. I ask for a just share. My expedition, which was frustrated, cost me much. Four thousand pounds would not cover all, including Mr. Pirelli's charges. I am content with a small share in return for saying nothing. I ask only for the Aphrodite which you showed to Mr. Pirelli. She will suffice me."

"And if we don't consent?"

"Then," said Visconti, "I will speak. This is no vain threat, captain. I will speak, and that immediately—tell the whole thing to the authorities."

"Yes; and what will they say? They will ask you what you were doing at Hyalos. You can't lie, for you hired those sponge-fishermen from Ægina to help you."

"I will say I was looking for a new ground for sponge-fishing," replied Visconti, without turning a hair. "Don't be deceived, captain. I can answer all enquiries. Well, what shall we say? Will it be silence and safety for you, or speech? You know me, and you know enough of me by now to realise that, being set on this matter, I will have no compunction. It is a gambling game, and if I don't have a share of the pool I will have my—what the gamblers call—revenge."

Sam looked at Bobby. He knew this scamp was speaking the truth, and that he would, if baulked, do as he said. He wished that Behrens would take a hand in the business, and he cast a sidelong glance at the door of the after-cabin. But the door was still half closed, and the concealed listener showed no sign.

It was Martia who spoke next.

"May I ask one thing?" said she. "How did you know of Hyalos?"

"That, mademoiselle, is my secret," replied Visconti. "And, quite honestly, the question has often occurred to me—how did you know of Hyalos? How was it that our two expeditions coincided?"

As if in answer to this question, the door of the after cabin suddenly opened and Behrens stood before them.

"Good-day, Visconti," said Behrens.

Visconti, who had been sitting with his back half turned to the door, rose and stared at the apparition that had suddenly materialised.

Martia, watching, saw him draw back slightly with the movement of the animal about to attack or be attacked. Instantly she knew that he feared Behrens, and from then on she watched the proceedings breathlessly and with the interest that drama only can give to the gazer.

"Good-day, Visconti," said Behrens, advancing from the door. "Pray take a seat. This, Mr. Lestrange, is my foreign agent and half-partner, Gabriel Visconti, to whom, the day before I spoke of the matter to you, I entrusted the secret of Hyalos, asking him to take the matter up and work it for me on a half-share basis. He turned the matter down; said he did not believe there was anything to it; doubted the legality of it if there was.

"He turned the matter down as far as I was concerned. He wanted it all for himself. He left England and fitted out his own expedition, not knowing that I had secured you, Mr. Lestrange, and that I was fitting out an expedition myself. Silence, Visconti; let me finish speaking! He met you at Hyalos, found you had forestalled him, and pursued you here, where he meets old Behrens, the man who has always befriended him and whom he betrayed. It is very funny."

Bobby heaved a deep sigh. All at once he remembered where he had heard Visconti's name before. The thing had worried him for weeks, but it was clear now. It was in Museum Street, on the evening when he had called to see Behrens, who had come to his front door to let out a visitor. He saw in a flash of memory the tall figure of a man departing in the lamplight, and he heard again Behrens' voice:

"Good-night, Visconti."

Everything was clear now, including the fact that the meeting of the two expeditions was no fortuitous happening.

Meanwhile, Behrens had taken his seat at the table almost opposite to his antagonist, who was still standing despite the invitation to be seated.

"Well," said Behrens, "what have you to say?"

"Only this," replied the other, who having recovered from the shock of the meeting seemed quite himself again. "How do you know that in this matter I was not working for you as well as myself?"

Behrens laughed.

"All I can say," he replied, "is that you have been working in a queer way. You said to me, 'There is nothing in this affair; it would not pay to go into it, the sea has eaten these things long ago.' Then you go off. Not a word from you. And the next I hear is that you have been into this affair up to the ears."

"A man may change his mind," said Visconti. "In fact, that is what I did. On second thoughts I changed my mind. I said to myself: 'Well, let us see. It is a gamble with nearly all the numbers zeros. Yet there is a chance.'"

"Why, then, did you not write to me and say that you were taking the chance?"

"A man may be too proud to acknowledge an alteration of mind," said Visconti; and Behrens laughed again.

Martia, who was watching and listening intently, noticed to her surprise that the tone of the discussion between the two art dealers was taking a more amicable trend. The anger and irritation had gone from Behrens' voice and manner, though she saw at once that he did not believe a word the other was saying. As for Visconti, he was quite affable and calm.

She did not know that Visconti was Behrens' right-hand man in Continental affairs, and that Behrens was an absolutely indispensable factor in the business life of Visconti; that they were a sort of Siamese twins. She could not appreciate the fact that though Behrens was an honest man as men go, roguery in the domain of art dealing was to him a lesser thing than roguery in ordinary life.

He had always found Visconti honest in money matters, but this was not so much a money matter as an art deal. The temptation had been too strong for Visconti to let run straight. It was a terrible temptation. All this was evidently present now in the mind of Behrens, inclining him to make allowances. Besides that, he did not want to break with the other. He was too valuable.

"If you say that you went into this matter on my account, as well as your own," said Behrens, "I cannot say that is not so, but I can say this: going into it as you did, without my knowledge or consent, leaves me in this position: I am quite outside your deal, which was undertaken on your own account, and I am not responsible for any of the money you spent. On the other hand, you are quite outside my deal and are not responsible for any of the money I have spent. Also you do not share in the profits. Yet I am not hard, and I will make you a concession."

Visconti leaned slightly forward.

"Another man," went on Behrens, "might say to you that your story is open to a shade of doubt, and that doubt between principal and agent is so undesirable that business relationship must be suspended. But I am not an ordinary man. I am Jacob Behrens. I am worth to you many thousand pounds a year. You are useful to me. And I say to you, Gabriel Visconti, that I will forget your story, I will not dismiss you as my agent, I will say nothing as long as you run straight. But should you breathe one word of this matter, either through negligence or malice, I will dismiss you as my agent and I will crush you, Gabriel Visconti. Like that!"

The terrible old man jabbed his thumb on the table as though he were crushing a fly.

"I will say nothing," said Visconti; and he meant it.

"One moment more," went on the other. "You do not know Jacob Behrens. Know him now. These things that have come into my possession I hold in trust for the world and for Greece, if she chooses to claim them. After my death all this will be known. Not one penny will I make from them. That is all I wish to say."

Visconti sighed. He was beaten, utterly beaten, yet he had got off lightly. If Behrens had broken off business relationship with him it would have been ruin, or nearly as bad.

"I will say nothing," he repeated, "only this. This gentleman"—indicating Sam—"gave me to understand that he had taken everything of value from the bay at Hyalos. May there not be something left, some little statue, something worth another search?"

"There may," said Behrens. "In fact there is. But nothing more must be taken. The tomb is sealed, unless it be my will that after my death the matter of Hyalos is made known as part of my gift to the world with these marbles."

Visconti sighed again.

He knew at once that all was over, that he was up against something harder than granite—the will of Behrens; Behrens, who desired a monument to his name and who had chosen to erect it not only from the fragments of art salved from Hyalos but from Hyalos itself.

Then suddenly Behrens broke out:

"I will not have the world flooded with these things. Beware, Visconti."

"Be assured," said the other. "I will say nothing. Well, I will not stay longer. I will call upon you in London on ordinary business in a day or so. And we are to consider this incident closed?"

"Yes."

Visconti bowed to Martia.

"We have had a keen fight, and I am beaten, captain," said he, turning to Sam; "but I bear you no grudge."

He bowed to Bobby. Then, hat in hand, he left the saloon and reached the deck. The others came up to see him off.

"There goes a great rogue," said Sam as they watched the boat reach the steps of the quay and Visconti stepping off.

"No, captain," said old Behrens, "only a great art dealer."

CHAPTER XXXIII

LONDON

They went below, and Behrens put on his spectacles and opened an account-book. Seated at the cabin table, and seemingly dismissing the marbles, Visconti, and everything else from his mind, this extraordinary man began to go into the accounts of the voyage with Bobby, the payment for this and that, the crew's wages, provisions bought in Genoa, harbour dues, everything.

It took half an hour, and then, leaving the Lorna, they went to the inn for luncheon. Visconti had already departed for town, so they had the place to themselves. When luncheon was over they went to the cottage to inspect the vases, Behrens nearly weeping at the rough packing around them, and at the thought of what might have happened to them.

"It was Providence," said he. "You did your best. You did well. But how were you to know? No one but an expert should touch such things. I will telegraph now for my man, Fernandez, to come, bringing with him a lorry. I take charge of everything now, Mr. Lestrange, and all responsibility. When I have weighed up matters, you shall receive your cheque, which you will doubtless divide with your friends."

"Not with me," said Martia. "I have done nothing."

"Nor with me," said Sam. "I went for the cruise. I said so at first. I have had the fun of the thing and that's all I want."

Now Behrens could understand all sorts and conditions of men, but he could not understand a small yachtsman of the type of Hackett. He thought he was mad in a mild sort of way, and he as much as said so.

"I don't want money," said Sam. "But I tell you what I will do. I'll buy the Lorna from you, if you'll let me have her cheap."

"That," said Behrens, "you must settle with Mr. Lestrange. He will act for me in selling the ship. I know nothing of ship matters."

They returned to the inn, Sam short in his manner and feeling rather snubbed. He could no more understand the art-dealer than the art-dealer could understand him, or the fact that the Lorna was more to Samuel Hackett than all the treasures of Hyalos. Martia was silent and Bobby gloomy. It was only now that the tension of the struggle with Visconti was relaxed that Bobby came under the blighting sense that Martia was lost to him, that she was Sam's; and that the biggest cheque that Behrens could pay him would fail to bring him happiness.

It was past three o'clock when they reached the inn.

"I shall go up to town by the five o'clock train," said Bobby. "There's nothing more to be done here and I wired yesterday to my landlady that I would be back to-day or to-morrow."

"I'll go with you," said Martia. "There's nothing I can do, and mother is expecting me. Are you staying?" turning to Sam.

"Yes," he replied. "I'll see you in town, but I'd better stay to-night to help to look after things. And I want to have a look at the Sandfly, to see how she's getting on."

Bobby went off to his room to pack, leaving the two lovers to say good-bye. A couple of hours later, seated alone with Martia in a first-class compartment of the Bournemouth express, it seemed to him that disaster at the hands of Visconti would have been almost better than this flat ending of his great adventure. What was the use of anything now, with the only woman he would ever care a button for lost to him as surely as that Victory they had dumped overboard in the Bay of Hyalos?

As he sat, gloomy and distrait, whilst Martia in her corner of the carriage was turning over the pages of an illustrated weekly and seeming to have forgotten for a moment his existence, he went over again in his mind the whole expedition: Genoa and the Greek bay, the salving of the marbles, Visconti and Pirelli, and the voyage home. It was all like a dream, the happiest dream, and it was over and done with for ever.

His gloom and depression seemed to have communicated themselves to the girl.

Even when the moment for parting came at Victoria, it did not help things much in the way of cheerfulness.

"I'll come round and see you at the office," said Bobby. "I expect you won't be settled down for a day or two, and I don't expect I'll hear anything from Behrens yet. When he does write, and if by any chance that cheque comes along, I am quite determined——Well, no matter. We will talk the matter over then."

He closed the taxi-cab door on her and gave directions to the driver. A little white hand, just stripped of its glove, came out of the window and he took it in his. Then, as the cab drove away, he turned to see after his luggage.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE END

It was in his rooms that night, after supper, and comfortably seated before the fire, that Bobby's troubles began. Common-sense whispered into his ear:

"She will never know now that you cared for her, really. Bother Sam Hackett and her engagement to him. You should have told her, told her in the train or at the station. Instead of that you sat dumb as a fish, sulking. And who's Sam Hackett, anyhow, that she should care for him more than for you? He's a nice fellow enough; but look at him. He has neither good looks nor anything else. Is it too late to speak to her now? Yes, it's too late. These things can only be done on the spur of the moment. You had your chance in the train and it's gone. Imagine calling now at the office in cold blood and saying, 'I'm awfully sorry but I forgot to tell you something I ought to have told you before——'"

He got up and paced the room.

Next morning brought him all sorts of work that had to be attended to; letters that had accumulated during his absence, and bills that had to be paid. His bank balance was low. The time spent on the expedition had been entirely unproductive in work or money. Unless Behrens paid him that promised cheque soon, he would be in a very difficult position.

He had determined to call on Martia, but not before that cheque arrived. He would take it with him and insist on her receiving her share of it. Anyhow, it would be something to call about. But would it ever arrive?

He asked himself this question on the morning following, when the post brought him only a book catalogue and a typewriting agency's circular.

Was Behrens to be trusted?

Behrens at Poole had exhibited a new side to his character. The purely business side. The way he had gone over the accounts, his grumble at the expense incurred at Genoa over stores, his refusal to sell the Lorna Doone at a cheap price, when, surely, out of gratitude he might have made Sam a present of her—all these things came back to Bobby, together with a certain coldness in the old man's manner now that everything was over and his ends secured.

Behrens, now that he had used the adventurers, seemed anxious to get rid of them all—so it seemed to Bobby—and there was no legal hold upon him, no contract, nothing.

On the morning of the third day, when the post had brought him nothing, not even a book catalogue, Bobby made up his mind to call on Behrens. Behrens by this time, in the super-heated atmosphere of Mr. Lestrange's imagination, had turned into a figure almost resembling a rogue.

He would have it out with Behrens and stand no nonsense. He was telling himself this, whilst putting on his overcoat, when a knock came at the door and the housemaid entered with a telegram.

It was from Behrens, and ran:

"Please see me either to-day or to-morrow."

Half an hour later he was in Museum Street. He dismissed his cab and entered the shop, where a young man was on guard—a foreign-looking individual, who was engaged at a side-table making a copy of a catalogue. This was Fernandez, Behrens' assistant, the man who had brought the lorry down to Poole for the conveyance back to town of the Hyalos marbles.

Fernandez said that his master was in, and was about to leave the shop to fetch him when, gliding amongst the antiques and past a Japanese warrior in steel armour, Behrens himself came.

He wore his skull-cap and he was smoking a cigarette through a long amber tube. Seeing who the visitor was he came forward, then, taking Bobby by the arm, he led the way through the back shop and upstairs to the sitting-room on the first floor.

"Well," said Behrens, "you have come. That is good, and now we can talk business. Take a seat and make yourself comfortable. Yes, I have got the things to London safe and sound, and I spent all yesterday in forming an estimate of their value. A difficult business, Mr. Lestrange, even for me. A business so difficult that I have determined to call in to my help, not now but at some future time, no less a person than M. Claudin Paris. I wish to be exact in my valuation. There is no use in talking vaguely of thousands of pounds. I wish to be exact. But till I arrive at some settled figure I have determined to offer you twenty."

Bobby felt as though someone had hit him on the head with a hammer.

Twenty pounds till Behrens "arrived at some settled figure"!

"Thank you," said he, "I would prefer to make them a present to you."

Behrens looked at him in astonishment.

"I do not know what is the matter with you all," he said. "I think you must all be a little mad. First Mr. Hackett, he wants nothing; then Martia Hare, she wants nothing; then Mr. Lestrange, he wants nothing. Are you so rich, then, as to turn twenty thousand pounds away from you as though they were twenty pence?"

"Twenty thousand?" cried Bobby.

Whilst he had been thinking in pounds, Behrens had been thinking in thousands!

Then he explained, and the old man laughed, made him sit down again, and went on:

"Yes, Mr. Lestrange, twenty thousand. Probably it will be more later on, but that much I can assure you of. The cheque is already made out. Here it is."

He rose and went to a desk and took out a cheque.

Bobby, taking it in his hands, looked at it, feeling like a man in a dream.

It was an extraordinary sensation, holding that slip of paper which was absolutely his and which represented a fortune.

Twenty thousand pounds! Many a man labours a lifetime without making that amount, or, making it, has to spend it in outgoing expenses, so that the end of his life finds him as poor as the beginning.

"It's good of you," was all he could find to say as he folded the cheque in three and placed it in his pocketbook.

"No," said Behrens, "it is only business. But that cheque is no use to you without a piece of advice. Draw that money and open an account with it at the same bank; it's one of the best in the world. Then ask them to invest it for you through their brokers in good sound securities. Then go on with whatever work you have taken up. A man of your age has no right to live on the interest of his money."

"I will do what you say," replied Bobby, "when I have seen Martia Hare, and if she still refuses to take anything."

The old fellow grinned.

"Go on then and see her," said he, taking Bobby by the arm and leading him down just as he had led him up. "See her and tell her old Behrens has not forgotten her. Ah, that is a girl! Do you know, Mr. Lestrange, why she will not take any money from this business? Well, I will tell you what is in my thoughts. Isaac was her lover, as you know, and this expedition would have been his had he lived. She would not make money out of it on that account. That is what I think. It is a beautiful thought. More beautiful even than the Aphrodite of Hyalos. Well, may she be happy yet with some man worthy of her. That is what I pray. Yes, come and see me again. I am always glad to see you, Mr. Lestrange, and her."

He showed Bobby into the street.

Here the huge cheque in the young man's pocket hit him again with the force of its eloquence. That vulgarism "money talks" expresses more than at first hearing it seems to do.

The cheque in his pocket was telling him that Museum Street was completely changed; that though the houses were still the same the atmosphere was different; that though it seemed to be leading him into New Oxford Street, it was in reality leading him into a new life.

It was only five minutes to eleven, so he determined to walk to Fleet Street. He was wise in this, for the walk gave him time to think, and freedom of mind to grasp and hold for a brief space the sense of Fortune.

Never again, no matter what his success might be, would he feel like that.

He chose to go by way of St. Martin's Lane, and then along the Strand, taking the same road as on that morning of his first visit to Martia, and, just as on that morning, he paused at the gunsmith's window to look at the guns and rifles.

And, just as on that morning, his heart went out to them; these very gods who preside over the destinies of their holders and handlers and the lives of the beasts of the jungle and the plain.

On that first day they had made the world of Literature seem a sick sort of place beside the world of Adventure. Since then he had tested the latter and knew the truth.

No. Once he had settled up the business of this cheque with Martia, he would write no more. He would seek the open spaces, where a man might breathe freely untrammelled by the thing we call Civilisation and free of the disease we call Love.

Again he saw the guns fading and giving place to the ghostly forms of the beasts of the jungle and the wilderness, whilst the sound of the Strand turned to the far-off roar of the tiger and the torrent. Then he turned and broke the spell, and passed on his way to White Lion Court.

Yes, Miss Hare was in, and would he wait, as she was engaged for a moment? It was just the same as on that first morning—the little waiting-room, the table with the papers laid out on it, the far-off clicking of typewriters, everything—just the same as though nothing had happened and the whole expedition had been a dream.

Then he was shown into Martia's room, and here again everything was just the same, even to the girl at the desk-table who rose to greet him, offered him a seat, and re-took her place at the table.

"I've got the cheque," said Bobby, after they had spoken a few words. "Behrens kept me waiting or I'd have called before. It's twenty thousand."

"Twenty thousand pounds?"

"Yes, twenty thousand. There may be more to come when he's had the opinion of another expert on the things, but anyhow it's not bad."

He fumbled in his pocket and produced the cheque which he handed to the girl, who looked at it, holding it for a moment, and then returning it to him.

He rose and placed it on the desk, and then sat down again.

"Half of that is yours," said he. "It is. I won't touch it unless you take your share. Sam refused anything, yet but for him and for you we'd never have pulled the business through. If you won't have it yourself, you've got to make him take it."

"But how am I to make him?" asked she. "I have no power over Mr. Hackett."

"Oh, yes you have. At least you will have. I've got to tell you that I couldn't help hearing what you said to him that night at the inn. I only heard a word, but it was enough. It told me everything."

"Word? At the inn? What on earth do you mean?"

"That you are engaged to him."

"Me? Engaged to Mr. Hackett?"

Martia looked at him as though she were doubtful as to his reason. Then a new light came into her eyes and across her face the ghost of a smile.

"Oh, I see now what you mean. I remember what he said that night." She laughed. "It was about Violet he was speaking."

"Violet?"

"My sister. He was engaged to her and they broke it off. It was the stupidest thing. That is what made him take to that horrid life all alone on a yacht. He really loved her just as she loves him. But I have made it all right now, and they are together again."

Before this news Bobby sat stricken dumb. He saw now the whole mystery of Sam and Martia in its proper light; the reason they had met in the first instance as strangers, yet evidently knowing one another; the reason Sam, the broken-hearted, had lapsed from sobriety at Genoa and Hyalos; the whole business and his own ghastly stupidity in flying to a wrong conclusion.

Then he leaned forward and took Martia by the hands.

She had loved him from the very first moment when he had come blundering into the office and into her life.

She told him so presently, speaking in a calm, level voice with a trace in her eyes of that strange remoteness which the sculptor had caught in the eyes of the Aphrodite of Hyalos.

Behrens is still alive. When he is dead the artistic world will, no doubt, receive the shock of its life, and Hyalos will perhaps deliver up, from the Street of Hermes and the Street of the Winds, treasures more wonderful than the Aphrodite or the ruins of the statue of Victory.

Even before that, if you have the money and the spirit of adventure and the time to hunt—for the location which I have given you is quite unreliable—you may forestall him and cover yourself with laurels—or, more likely, get yourself into a Greek prison! But you will get neither Robert Lestrange nor Samuel Hackett to assist you in the business. They are two happily married men in an age strangely unproductive of happy marriages.

THE END

[Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation left as printed.]

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Table of Contents

- THE CITY IN THE SEA
- FOREWORD
- CONTENTS
- The City in the Sea

- CHAPTER I

- A MODERN BUSINESS GIRL

- CHAPTER II

- A SMALL YACHTSMAN AND AN OLD DEALER

- CHAPTER III

- THE QUESTION

- CHAPTER IV

- THE REVELATION

- CHAPTER V

- HOW?

- CHAPTER VI

- MISS BEAMAN

- CHAPTER VII

- POOLE

- CHAPTER VIII

- THE PURCHASE OF THE "LORNA DOONE"

- CHAPTER IX

- MARTIA

- CHAPTER X

- DEEP SEA GEAR

- CHAPTER XI

- THE CREW OF BLIND MEN

- CHAPTER XII

- MARTIA'S SECRET

- CHAPTER XIII

- THE START

- CHAPTER XIV

- GENOA

- CHAPTER XV

- TOWARDS HYALOS

- CHAPTER XVI

- HYALOS

- CHAPTER XVII

- THE HOUSES

- CHAPTER XVIII

- A TERRIBLE DANGER

- CHAPTER XIX

- ONE OF THE DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE

- CHAPTER XX

- PLANS

- CHAPTER XXI

- THE SHIP

- CHAPTER XXII

- THE DUMPING OF THE VICTORY

- CHAPTER XXIII

- THE BOAT FROM ÆGINA

- CHAPTER XXIV

- A MAN OF WAR

- CHAPTER XXV

- GENOA AGAIN

- CHAPTER XXVI

- THE CUSTOMS

- CHAPTER XXVII

- THE GREAT ATTEMPT

- CHAPTER XXVIII

- WEST

- CHAPTER XXIX

- VISCONTI

- CHAPTER XXX

- CORNERED

- CHAPTER XXXI

- BEHRENS

- CHAPTER XXXII

- A GREAT ART DEALER

- CHAPTER XXXIII

- LONDON

- CHAPTER XXXIV

- THE END

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE