all right, I ought to get back to the bridge."

"Take me below," Liane begged. "I must speak with Captain Monk."

Monk and Phinuit were taking their ease plus nightcaps in the captain's
sitting-room. A knock brought a prompt invitation to "Come in!" Lanyard
thrust the door open and curtly addressed Monk: "Mademoiselle Delorme
wishes to see you." The eloquent eyebrows indicated surprise and
resignation, and Monk got up and inserted himself into his white linen
tunic. Phinuit, more sensitive to the accent of something amiss,
hurried out in unceremonious shirt sleeves. "What's up?" he demanded,
looking from Lanyard's grave face to Liane's face of pallor and
distress. Lanyard informed him in a few words.

"Impossible!" Phinuit commented.

"Nonsense," Monk added, speaking directly to Liane. "You imagined it
all."

She had recovered much of her composure, enough to enable her to shrug
her disdain of such stupidity.

"I tell you only what my two eyes saw."

"To be sure," Monk agreed with a specious air of being wide open to
conviction. "What became of him, then?"

"You ask me that, knowing that in stress of terror I fainted!"

The eyebrows achieved an effect of studied weariness. "And you saw
nobody, monsieur? And Collison didn't, either?"

Lanyard shook his head to each question. "Still, it is possible----."

Monk cut him short impatiently. "All gammon--all in her eye! No man
bigger than a cockroach could have smuggled himself aboard this yacht
without my being told. I know my ship, I know my men, I know what I'm
talking about."

"Presently," Liane prophesied darkly, "you may be talking about
nothing."

At a loss, Monk muttered: "Don't get you...."

"When you find yourself, some fine morning, with your throat cut in
your sleep, like poor de Lorgnes--or garroted, as I might have been."

"I'm not going to lose any sleep....." Monk began.

"Lose none before you have the vessel searched," Liane pleaded, with a
change of tone. "You know, messieurs, I am not a woman given to
hallucinations. I _saw_ ... And I tell you, while that assassin is at
liberty aboard this yacht, not one of our lives is worth a sou--no, not
one!"

"Oh, you shall have your search." Monk gave in as one who indulges a
childish whim. "But I can tell you now what we'll find--or won't."

"Then Heaven help us all!" Liane went swiftly to the door of her room,
but there hesitated, looking back in appeal to Lanyard. "I am
afraid...."

"Let me