demon of bitterness had entered into little Fyne. He amazed me as
though he had changed his skin from white to black. It was quite as
wonderful. And he kept it up, too.

"Luckily there are some advantages in the--the profession of a sailor. As
long as they defy the world away at sea somewhere eighteen thousand miles
from here, I don't mind so much. I wonder what that interesting old
party will say. He will have another surprise. They mean to drag him
along with them on board the ship straight away. Rescue work. Just
think of Roderick Anthony, the son of a gentleman, after all . . . "

He gave me a little shock. I thought he was going to say the "son of the
poet" as usual; but his mind was not running on such vanities now. His
unspoken thought must have gone on "and uncle of my girls." I suspect
that he had been roughly handled by Captain Anthony up there, and the
resentment gave a tremendous fillip to the slow play of his wits. Those
men of sober fancy, when anything rouses their imaginative faculty, are
very thorough. "Just think!" he cried. "The three of them crowded into
a four-wheeler, and Anthony sitting deferentially opposite that
astonished old jail-bird!"

The good little man laughed. An improper sound it was to come from his
manly chest; and what made it worse was the thought that for the least
thing, by a mere hair's breadth, he might have taken this affair
sentimentally. But clearly Anthony was no diplomatist. His brother-in-
law must have appeared to him, to use the language of shore people, a
perfect philistine with a heart like a flint. What Fyne precisely meant
by "wrangling" I don't know, but I had no doubt that these two had
"wrangled" to a profoundly disturbing extent. How much the other was
affected I could not even imagine; but the man before me was quite
amazingly upset.

"In a four-wheeler! Take him on board!" I muttered, startled by the
change in Fyne.

"That's the plan--nothing less. If I am to believe what I have been
told, his feet will scarcely touch the ground between the prison-gates
and the deck of that ship."

The transformed Fyne spoke in a forcibly lowered tone which I heard
without difficulty. The rumbling, composite noises of the street were
hushed for a moment, during one of these sudden breaks in the traffic as
if the stream of commerce had dried up at its source. Having an
unobstructed view past Fyne's shoulder, I was astonished to see that the
girl w