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that. But, oh God! what torture! Every moment! every
moment! I’ve been sick ever since I learned you were on the vessel. Horace is
already wondering what’s the matter.”
    “Damn Horace!” said the man thickly. “Damn his soul to hell!”
    “Oh, hush!” wailed Adele. “What good does that do?”
    “Do you love this man?” he demanded savagely.
    “Love him? I hate him! I hate him! You don’t know what I have to go
through!”
    “Look!” he said eagerly. “We’re going to call at one of the islands
to-morrow. Come ashore with me. We’ll make our way back to New York
somehow.”
    “He has promised me the Emeritinsky diamond. It’s worth a hundred thousand
dollars.”
    “To hell with it! Do you want to drive me crazy?”
    “I won’t go.”
    “You’ve got to go!”
    A thin hard note crept into Adele’s voice. “I won’t go. And you can’t make
me! This is our one chance to make a stake. If I passed it up, you would be
the first one to blame me when we went broke again. We’ve got to have money.
How are we going to live?”
    There was a silence, then the man’s voice, humbled, indicating that he had
given in. “But you do care for me, don’t you?”
    “You know I do!”
    “All right,” he said. “If you’ll just let me see you once in a while, I’ll
keep quiet.”
    “How can I do that?” mourned Adele. “Think of the risk! Oh, God! this is
awful!”
    I stole away back up the stairs. I could not tell how suddenly this scene
might end. If the door opened there I was. Anyhow, I had learned the nature
of the situation. That was enough for the moment, I returned to the
winter-garden. The noisy game—or another game—was still in
progress. I let Mme. Storey know that I wanted to speak to her privately.
When she was able to get away we went down to the promenade deck. On the
stairway we met Adele coming up. She had brightened up her complexions and
passed us with a sweet insincere smile.
    Out on deck as soon as I started to tell Mme. Storey what I had overheard,
she said:
    “Come on; let’s try to intercept him on the way back to his quarters.”
    Forward of the promenade deck and below it, there was a space between the
owner’s part of the ship and the fo’c’sle that they called the well deck.
There was a ladder leading down from the promenade. We descended it, and
waited at the foot while I told the rest of my tale. There was nobody
around.
    A door opened aft, and our sailor came out of it. He was passing us
without paying any attention when Mme. Storey said softly:
    “Holder!”
    He jumped as if he had received a stab, and turned a terrified face. He
tried to recover himself but it was too late.
    “Were you speaking to me?”
    “No use trying to bluff it out,” said Mme. Storey. “Your talk with your
wife just now was overheard.”
    “Spying!” he snarled.
    She ignored it. “You and I have got to have a little talk.”
    “You’ve got nothing to do with me!”
    “If you act ugly,” she said coldly, “I shall have to tell Horace Laghet
that you are aboard this vessel. You can figure out what that will mean.”
    He said nothing. His chin went down. I could hear him breathing fast.
    “I don’t want to be a party to a killing,” she went on. “You’d better come
to my suite and talk things over.”
    “Not allowed in that part of the vessel,” he growled.
    “You have just come from there. If you are with me nobody will question
it.”
    He shrugged and followed us. It was after midnight, and we met nobody in
the corridor. At a sign from my employer I locked the door of our
sitting-room after we had passed in. She said:
    “Put up your hands!”
    He stared at her open-mouthed, and did not obey until he saw that she had
taken a small automatic from the drawer of the table and was playing with it.
Then his hands went up fast enough.
    “Search him, Bella.”
    I took a gun from his hip-pocket. It was the only weapon he had on him. I
handed it