"What can my papers concern them?" exclaimed the jovial, round-faced
Consul, a man whose courtesy is known to every skipper trading up and
down the Mediterranean, and who is perhaps one of the most cultured and
popular men in the British Consular Service. "I don't keep bank notes in
that safe, you know. We fellows in the Service don't roll in gold as our
public at home appears to think."

"No. But you may have something in there which might be of value to
them. You're often the keeper of valuable documents belonging to
Englishmen abroad, you know."

"Certainly. But there's nothing in there just now except, perhaps, the
registers of births, marriages and deaths of British subjects, and the
papers concerning a Board of Trade inquiry. No, my dear Gordon, depend
upon it that the yacht running ashore was all a blind. They did it so as
to be able to get the run of the Consulate, secure the ciphers, and sail
merrily away with them. It seems to me, however, that they gave you a
jolly good dinner and got nothing in return."

"They might very easily have carried me off too," I declared.

"Perhaps it would have been better if they had. You'd at least have had
the satisfaction of knowing what their little game really was!"

"But the man and the woman who left the yacht an hour before she sailed,
and who slipped away into the country somewhere! I wonder who they were?
Hornby distinctly told me that he and Chater were alone, and yet there
was evidently a lady and a gentleman on board. I guessed there was a
woman there, from the way the boudoir and ladies' saloon were arranged,
and certainly no man's hand decorated a dinner table as that was