tainly interesting," replied Miss Raven.
"Especially if you really are a desperado. Perhaps--you'll give us
more of it?"

"I'll tell you a bit--later on," he said. "That Quick business, I
mean."

Suddenly, setting down his tea-cup, he got up and moved away towards
the galley, into which he presently disappeared. Miss Raven turned
sharply on me.

"Did you eat a slice of that plum-cake?" she whispered. "You did?"

"I know what you're thinking," I answered. "It reminds you of the cake
that Lorrimore's man, Wing, makes."

"Reminds!" she exclaimed. "There's no reminding about it! Do you know
what I think? That man Wing is aboard this yacht! He made that cake!"

CHAPTER XIX

BLACK MEMORIES

There was so much of real importance, not only to us in our present
situation, but to the trend of things in general, in Miss Raven's
confident suggestion that her words immediately plunged me into a
thoughtful silence. Rising from my chair at the tea-table, I walked
across to the landward side of the yawl, and stood there, reflecting.
But it needed little reflection to convince me that what my
fellow-prisoner had just suggested was well within the bounds of
possibility. I recalled all that we knew of the recent movements of
Dr. Lorrimore's Chinese servant. Wing had gone to London, on the
pretext of finding out something about that other problematical
Chinese, Lo Chuh Fen. Since his departure, Lorrimore had had no
tidings of him and his doings--in Lorrimore's opinion, he might be
still in London, or he might have gone to Liverpool, or to Cardiff, to
any port where his fellow-countrymen are to be found in England. Now
it was well within probabilities that Wing, being in Limehouse or
Poplar, and in touch with Chinese sailor-men, should, with others,
have taken service with Baxter and his accomplice, and, at that very
moment there, in that sheltered cove on the Northumbrian coast, be
within a few yards of Miss Raven and myself, separated from us by a
certain amount of deck-planking and a few bulkheads. But why? If he
was there, in that yawl, in what capacity--real capacity--was he
there? Ostensibly, as cook, no doubt--but that, I felt sure, would be
a mere blind. Put plainly, if he was there, what game was that bland,
suave, obsequious, soft-tongued Chinaman playing? Was this his way of
finding out what all of us wanted to know? If it came to it, if there
was occasion--such occasion as I dared not contemplate--could Miss
R