own into the tiny cabin. It was lighted, and the doors of the two
box-like staterooms were open. Prime felt for the button on the jamb of
the right-hand door and Lucetta's sleeping-niche sprang alight. She
looked in and gave a little cry of astonishment.

"My suitcases!" she exclaimed; "the ones I left in the Quebec hotel!"

Prime snapped the opposite switch and looked on his own side. "My auto
trunk, too," he conceded sourly. "We didn't need any more evidence, but
this is conclusive. Grider has had his horse-laugh, and the least he
could do in the wind-up was to bring us our belongings. I suppose we are
compelled to be indebted to him for getting us out of the scrape with
Macdougal, much as it goes against the grain; but to-morrow we'll settle
with him."

Lucetta braced herself in her doorway against the surge and swing of the
racing cruiser.

"He doesn't look like a man who could be so wholly lost to all sense
of--of the fitness of things, Donald," she ventured, as one who would
not be immitigably vindictive.

"He looks, and acts, like a wild ass of the desert!" Prime stormed, in a
fresh access of resentment. And then: "You'd best go to bed and get
what sleep you can. Heaven only knows what new piece of buffoonery will
be sprung upon us to-morrow morning."

She looked up with the adorable little grimace, a copy of which he had
long since resolved to wish upon his next and most bewitching heroine.

"I believe you are angry yet," she chided, half in mockery. "I like you
best when you don't scowl so ferociously, Cousin Donald. You forget that
we have agreed that it wasn't all bad. Good night." And she closed her
door.

Turning out of his box-berth the next morning, Prime found the sun
shining broadly in at the stateroom port-light. The motorboat was at
rest and the machinery was stopped. A bath, a shave, and a complete
change to fresh haberdashery made him feel somewhat less pugnacious, and
stumbling up the companion to the cockpit he saw that the cruiser was
tied up at a wharf on the river fringe of a considerable city; saw,
also, that Lucetta, likewise renewed as to her outward appearance, was
awaiting him.

"Where is Grider?" he demanded shortly.

"He has gone somewhere to get an auto to take us to a hotel."

"What city is this?"

"It is Ottawa. Don't you see the government buildings up there on the
hill?"

Prime was silent for a moment. Then he said: "He needn't think he is
going to smooth it all ove