d; "I'll do my best."

We parted for an hour or so. My waiting at the station came to nothing,
and when Hinge returned he had no news worth the telling. The regular
liners were all known, and had been easy enough to find. He had learned
by cunning inquiry that luggage had been taken that evening aboard a
craft whose destination v was unknown, and he had had her pointed out to
him. When he had pulled out into the harbor to speak the craft, he had
been warned away by a man who either could not understand him or refused
to do so. It was not in itself a suspicious or remarkable thing that
a stranger should not have been allowed to board a foreign craft after
dark, but in the circumstances it was enough to make me believe that
this was the ship by which the traitorous party was to sail. To be
so near, to know so much, and yet to be so helpless was downright
maddening.

"Once the money is in the hands of those wretches," I said, "once they
are away, the count is doomed. That headstrong old woman is throwing
away her niece's fortune to betray her niece's father; and if she knew
what she was doing she would sooner put her own right hand in the fire."

"If I was you, sir," Hinge responded, "I shouldn't let her do it."

"You wouldn't?" I responded.

"No, sir," said Hinge; "I wouldn't."

"And how would you prevent it?" I asked. I spoke eagerly, for I could
not help thinking he had some scheme in mind.

"I don't know, sir," said Hinge; "but I shouldn't let 'er do it. I'd
rouse the town agen 'em. Do you mean to tell me, sir, as any set of
English people 'ud let a lot of scoundrels like them go off to sell the
life of an innocent gentleman? I don't believe it. I should rouse the
town."

I bade him hold his tongue and go, and for two or three hours I sat by
myself, raging at my own helplessness. There is nothing so intolerable
to an active mind as the sense of urgent duty confronted by impotence.
And if ever circumstance in the whole history of the world yet justified
a man, sane and sober, in a madman's act, I felt myself justified when
the last desperate resort occurred to me.

CHAPTER XX

I said not a word; but I sat by myself, and I matured, I think, the
maddest scheme that ever entered a sane man's head. Desperate diseases,
as everybody knows, ask for desperate remedies, and here I do not know
how it was possible for anybody to overestimate the urgency of the case.
Count Rossano has gone peacefully to his rest n