ut what does that explain?" asked Lady Agatha. "Perhaps the Earl of
Claiborne came to this country and took to making counterfeit money in
the hold of the Jasper B., into and out of which he stole like a ghost?
Finally he got tired of it and blew himself up with a bomb out there,
leaving his ring with a piece of money intact? Is that the explanation
we get out of our facts? Because, you know," she added, as Cleggett
did not smile, "all that is absurd!"

"Yes," said Cleggett, still refusing to be amused, "but out of all this
jumble of mystery, just one certain thing appears."

"And that is?"

"That our destinies are somehow linked!"

"Our destinies? Linked?"

She gave him a swift look, and as suddenly dropped her eyes again.
Cleggett could not tell whether she was offended or not by his
expression of the idea.

"The same people," said Cleggett, after a brief pause, "who are so
persistently hostile to me are also in some manner connected with your
own misfortunes. Their possession of this ring shows that."

"Yes," she said, following his thought, "that is true--whoever set off
that bomb was also wearing this ring, or was very near the person who
was wearing it. And," with a shudder which conveyed to Cleggett that
she was thinking of the box on deck, "it COULDN'T have been Reginald
Maltravers!"

"Perhaps," said Cleggett, "someone was sneaking over from Morris's with
the intention of destroying the Jasper B., and was himself the victim
of a premature explosion as he crouched behind the rocks to await his
opportunity."

"But why," puzzled Lady Agatha, with contracted brows, "should a
dynamiter, anarchistic or otherwise, be holding a counterfeit
twenty-dollar bill in his hand as he went about his work?"

Cleggett brooded in silence.

"We are in the midst of mysteries," he said finally. "They are
multiplying about us."

He was about to say more. He was about to express again his belief
that they had been flung together by fate. The sense that their
stories were inextricably intertwined, that they must henceforward
march on as one mystery towards a solution, was exhilarating to him.
But how was it possible that she should feel the same sense of pleasure
in the fact that they faced dangers, seen and unseen, together?

Together!--How the thought thrilled him!

On deck, Elmer, before returning to the box of Reginald Maltravers,
suddenly and unexpectedly grasped Cleggett by the hand.

"Bo," he said, "