wiping the table, and withdrew.

"That's what it was--a real, go-as-you-please scrap. And Zangiacomo
began it. Oh, here's Schomberg. Say, Schomberg, didn't he fly at you,
when the girl was missed, because it was you who insisted that the
artists should go about the audience during the interval?"

Schomberg had reappeared in the doorway. He advanced. His bearing
was stately, but his nostrils were extraordinarily expanded, and he
controlled his voice with apparent effort.

"Certainly. That was only business. I quoted him special terms and
all for your sake, gentlemen. I was thinking of my regular customers.
There's nothing to do in the evenings in this town. I think, gentlemen,
you were all pleased at the opportunity of hearing a little good music;
and where's the harm of offering a grenadine, or what not, to a lady
artist? But that fellow--that Swede--he got round the girl. He got round
all the people out here. I've been watching him for years. You remember
how he got round Morrison."

He changed front abruptly, as if on parade, and marched off. The
customers at the table exchanged glances silently. Davidson's attitude
was that of a spectator. Schomberg's moody pacing of the billiard-room
could be heard on the veranda.

"And the funniest part is," resumed the man who had been speaking
before--an English clerk in a Dutch house--"the funniest part is that
before nine o'clock that same morning those two were driving together
in a gharry down to the port, to look for Heyst and the girl. I saw them
rushing around making inquiries. I don't know what they would have
done to the girl, but they seemed quite ready to fall upon your Heyst,
Davidson, and kill him on the quay."

He had never, he said, seen anything so queer. Those two investigators
working feverishly to the same end were glaring at each other with
surprising ferocity. In hatred and mistrust they entered a steam-launch,
and went flying from ship to ship all over the harbour, causing no end
of sensation. The captains of vessels, coming on shore later in the day,
brought tales of a strange invasion, and wanted to know who were the two
offensive lunatics in a steam-launch, apparently after a man and a girl,
and telling a story of which one could make neither head nor tail. Their
reception by the roadstead was generally unsympathetic, even to the
point of the mate of an American ship bundling them out over the rail
with unseemly precipitation.

Meantime Heyst and