Mr. Smithson came back to the yacht just in time to dress for dinner.  Don Gomez excused himself from putting on his dress suit.  He was going to sail the yacht himself, and he was dressed for his work, picturesquely, in white duck trousers, white silk shirt, and black velvet shooting jacket.  He dined with the permission of the ladies, in this costume, in which he looked so much handsomer than in the livery of polite life.  He had a red scarf tied round his waist, and when at his work by-and-by, he wore a little red silk cap, just stuck lightly on his dark hair.  The dinner to-day was all animation and even excitement, very different from the languorous calm of yesterday.  Lesbia seemed a new creature.  She talked and laughed and flashed and sparkled as she had never yet done within Mr. Smithson’s experience.  He contemplated the transformation with wonder not unmixed with suspicion.  Never for him had she been so brilliant—­never in response to his glances had her violet eyes thus kindled, had her smile been so entrancingly sweet.  He watched Montesma, but in him he could find no fault.  Even jealousy could hardly take objection to the Spaniard’s manner to Lady Lesbia.  There was not a look, not a word that hinted at a private understanding between them, or which seemed to convey deeper meanings than the common language of society.  No, there was no ground for fault-finding; and yet Smithson was miserable.  He knew this man of old, and knew his influence over women.

Mr. Smithson handed over the management of the yacht without a murmer, albeit he pretended to be able to sail her himself, and was in the habit of taking the command for a couple of hours on a sunny afternoon, much to the amusement of skipper and crew.  But Montesma was a sailor born and bred—­the salt keen breath of the sea had been the first breath in his nostrils—­he had managed his light felucca before he was twelve years old, had sailed every inch of the Caribbean Sea, and northward to the furthermost of the Bahamas before he was fifteen.  He had lived more on the water than on the land in that wild boyhood of his; a boyhood in which books and professors had played but small part.  Montesma’s school had been the world, and beautiful women his only professors.  He had learnt arithmetic from the transactions of bubble companies; modern languages from the lips of the women who loved him.  He was a crack shot, a perfect swordsman, a reckless horseman, and a dancer in whom dancing almost rose to genius.  Beyond these limits he was as ignorant as dirt; but he had a cleverness which served as a substitute for book learning, and he seldom failed in impressing the people he met with the idea that he, Gomez de Montesma, was no ordinary man.

Directly after dinner the preparations for an immediate start began; very much to the disgust of skipper and crew, who were not in the habit of working after dinner; but Montesma cared nothing for the short answers of the captain, or the black look of the men.