next steamer.
No--that part of the past had merely surged up for a moment on the
fleeing surface of events; and now that it was submerged again, the
uncertainty, the apprehension persisted.

They grew to sudden acuteness as she caught sight of George Dorset
descending the steps of the Hotel de Paris and making for her across the
square. She had meant to drive down to the quay and regain the yacht; but
she now had the immediate impression that something more was to happen
first.

"Which way are you going? Shall we walk a bit?" he began, putting the
second question before the first was answered, and not waiting for a
reply to either before he directed her silently toward the comparative
seclusion of the lower gardens.

She detected in him at once all the signs of extreme nervous tension.
The skin was puffed out under his sunken eyes, and its sallowness had
paled to a leaden white against which his irregular eyebrows and long
reddish moustache were relieved with a saturnine effect. His appearance,
in short, presented an odd mixture of the bedraggled and the ferocious.

He walked beside her in silence, with quick precipitate steps, till they
reached the embowered slopes to the east of the Casino; then, pulling up
abruptly, he said: "Have you seen Bertha?"

"No--when I left the yacht she was not yet up."

He received this with a laugh like the whirring sound in a disabled
clock. "Not yet up? Had she gone to bed? Do you know at what time she
came on board? This morning at seven!" he exclaimed.

"At seven?" Lily started. "What happened--an accident to the train?"

He laughed again. "They missed the train--all the trains--they had to
drive back."

"Well----?" She hesitated, feeling at once how little even this necessity
accounted for the fatal lapse of hours.

"Well, they couldn't get a carriage at once--at that time of night, you
know--" the explanatory note made it almost seem as though he were
putting the case for his wife--"and when they finally did, it was only a
one-horse cab, and the horse was lame!"

"How tiresome! I see," she affirmed, with the more earnestness because
she was so nervously conscious that she did not; and after a pause she
added: "I'm so sorry--but ought we to have waited?"

"Waited for the one-horse cab? It would scarcely have carried the four of
us, do you think?"

She took this in what seemed the only possible way, with a laugh intended
to sink the question itself in his humorous tre