" I added inwardly,
computing cable rates, but assuming a lordly indifference to them which
only a multimillionaire could really feel.

The Englishman and the captain consulted a moment. Then the former
spoke:

"That will be satisfactory, sir, to Captain Cecchi and to me. Write out
your cables, if you please. They shall be sent. And I say, Mr. Bayne,--I
hope you drive that ambulance. I'm not stationed here to be a partizan,
but you've stood up to us like a man."

An hour later as I finished my solitary dinner, the electric lights
flickered and died, and the engines began their throb. Under cover of
the darkness we were slipping out of Gibraltar. I leaned my arms on the
table and scanned the remains of my feast by the light of my one sad
candle, not thinking of what I saw, or of the various calls for help I
had been dispatching, or of the sailor grimly mounting guard outside my
door. I was remembering a girl, a girl with ruddy hair and a wild-rose
flush and great, gray, starry eyes, a girl that by all the rules of the
game I should have handed over to those who represented the countries
she was duping, a girl that I had found I had to shield when I came face
to face with the issue.

CHAPTER IX

THE BLACK BUTTERFLIES

The Turin-Paris express--the most direct, the Italians call it--was
too popular by half to suit the taste of morose beings who wished for
solitude. With great trouble and pains I had ferreted out a single
vacant compartment; but as four o'clock sounded and the whistle blew for
departure, a belated traveler joined me--worse still, an acquaintance
who could not be quite ignored.

The unwelcome intruder was Mr. John Van Blarcom, my late fellow-voyager,
and he accepted the encounter with a better grace than I.

"Why, hello!" he greeted me cheerfully. "Going through to France? Glad
to see you--but you're about the last man that I was looking for. I got
the idea somehow you were planning to stop a while in Rome."

I returned his nod with a curtness I was at no pains to dissemble. Then
I reproached myself, for it was undeniable that on the _Re d'Italia_ he
had more than once stood my friend. He had offered me a timely warning,
which I had flouted; he had obligingly confirmed my statement in my
grueling third degree. Yet despite this, or because of it, I didn't like
him; nor did I like his patronizing, complacent manner, which seemed
fairly to shriek at me, "I told you so!"

"Changed my plans," I ac