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angles on this thing are different. If I did decide to go off on this crazy mission, it wouldn’t be because I thought I was doing a great service to someone or making people any happier .“
    “You mean it would be for the money.”
    “For the money, and only for the money. I’d be a mercenary, and that would have to be quite clear from the
    start . Not that I think I’d ever need twenty thousand pounds, but I could certainly use a fine ship.”
    “Does that mean so much to you?”
    “It means pretty well everything to me. It’s my way of life.”
    “Aren’t you ever lonely?”
    “Oh, yes, sometimes, when the weather’s good and there’s not much to occupy me. But the feeling passes .“
    “What’s attractive about the life?”
    “To me? Absolute freedom and independence. Never having to study anyone’s wishes but my own.”
    “It sounds selfish, the way you put it.”
    “Maybe it is—but I can’t help that. I ask very little of the world and I don’t think I owe it anything. At least, the way I live doesn’t harm anybody else.”
    “But surely,” Leanda said, “one has to do something in the world. Not just go round and round it.”
    “I don’t see why. It seems to me there are far too many people doing far too much already. Wasn’t it Lord Melbourne who once said, ‘Whenever I hear a man say something must be done, I know he’s about to do something damn silly!’? I prefer just going round and round.”
    “But one can’t live happily without responsibility or friends or affection.”
    “I get by,” Conway said. “I’m used to traveling light. There’s all the responsibility I want getting my ship safely to port. And I have a lot of friends round the world, even though I don’t look them up very often—or perhaps because!”
    “Don’t you ever get bored?”
    “Not for long—the contrasts are too sharp for that. When
    I’ve been at sea for a week or two I can’t bear the sight of it and long for the shore. Then I go ashore, and I enjoy it much more than most landsmen, I can tell you. When I’ve been ashore for a few days I can’t bear the sight of that either. So I go to sea again, and it feels marvelous.”
    “It all sounds very pointless,” Leanda said.
    “What isn’t?”
    “In my view, freeing Alexander Kastella.”
    Conway laughed. “Well, we seem to be back where we started. You’re dedicated—I’m not. At least we have no illusions about each other—which is just as well if we’re to go along together for a bit.”
    Her eyes opened wide. “You mean we are to go along together?”
    “We’ll go to Mombasa , anyway,” Conway said, “and see what happens.”
    “That was a remarkably quick decision.”
    “Well, you’re rather a remarkable woman,” Conway said. It took five days for the initial arrangements to be made. In that time, Conway and Leanda paid several secret visits to the anchored steam yacht after dark. Metaxas, exuberantly pleased at Conway ’s decision, threw himself eagerly into the preliminary planning. The details, he agreed, would have to be settled by Conway in Mombasa , but he hoped to get a steady flow of coded information from there through his agent, a man named Ionides, with whom Conway would be working. He still tended to talk of the prospective expedition as though it were a rather glamorous adventure, but there was no denying his shrewd grasp of all the practical questions involved. He was, Conway could see, a brilliant organizer of immense energy, and his pleasure at being able to use his talents in an active way on behalf of Spyros was unmistakable. Until now, Conway suspected, he had been little more in the politics of his country than a keen and well-meaning amateur, naively pretending to himself that he was at the heart of the struggle when in fact he was out of touch and operating in a wordy vacuum of his own on the periphery. Now, beyond any doubt, he was doing something that could have a tremendous effect on his