“Then your picturesque confrere, Captain Monk; and the singular circumstance that he owns a wealthy cousin of the same name; and this beautiful little yacht which you seem so free to utilize for the furtherance of your purposes.  Is it strange, then, that one’s curiosity is provoked, one’s imagination alternately stimulated and baffled?”

“No; I suppose not,” Phinuit conceded thoughtfully.  “Still, it’s far simpler than you’d think.”

“One has found that true of most mysteries, monsieur.”

“I don’t mind telling you all I feel at liberty to....  You seem to have a pretty good line on mademoiselle, and I’ve told you what I know about de Lorgnes.  As for the skipper, he’s the black sheep of a good old New England family.  Ran away to sea as a boy, and was disowned, and grew up in a rough school.  It would take all night to name half the jobs he’s had a hand in, mostly of a shady nature, in every quarter of the seven seas:  gun running, pearl poaching, what not—­even a little slaving, I suspect, in his early days.  He’s a pompous old bluff in repose, but nobody’s fool, and a bad actor when his mad is up.  He tells me he fell in with the Delorme a long time ago, while acting as personal escort for a fugitive South American potentate who crossed the borders of his native land with the national treasury in one hand and his other in Monk’s, and of course—­they all do—­made a bee line for Paris.  That’s how we came to make her acquaintance, my revered employer, Mister Monk, and I—­through the skipper, I mean.”

Phinuit paused to consider, and ended with a whimsical grimace.

“I’m talking too much; but it doesn’t matter, seein’s it’s you.  Strictly between ourselves, the said revered employer is an annointed fraud.  Publicly he’s the pillar of the respectable house of Monk.  Privately, he’s not above profiteering, foreclosing the mortgage on the old homestead, and swearing to an odoriferous income-tax return.  And when he thinks he’s far enough away from home—­my land, how that little man do carry on!

“The War made him more money than he ever thought there was; so he bought this yacht ready-made and started on the grand tour, but never got any farther than Paris—­naturally his first stop.  News from home to the effect that somebody was threatening to do him out of a few nickels sent him hightailing back to put a stop to it.  But before that happened, he wanted to see life with a large L; and Cousin Whitaker gave him a good start by introducing him to little ingenue Liane.  And then she put the smuggling bee in his bonnet.”

“Smuggling!”

Lanyard began to experience glimpses....