irritable-minded
ex-ambassador to Persia, together with a scrupulously inattentive
trained nurse, who, apparently, preferred diamonds to a uniform, and
smuggled incredible quantities of hand-made lace under the tonneau
seat-cushions. And then he had found himself at Monte Carlo, still
waiting for word from Paris, fighting against a grim new temptation
which, vampire-like, had grown stronger and stronger as its victim
daily had grown weaker and weaker.

For along the sea-front, one indolent and golden afternoon, he had
learned that an American yacht in the harbor was sending ashore for a
practical electrician, since a defective generator had left its cabins
of glimmering white and gold in sudden darkness. Durkin, after a brief
talk with the second officer, had been taken aboard the tender and
hurried out to where the lightless steamer rocked and swung at her
anchor chain in the intense turquoise bay. He had hoped, at first,
that he was approaching his ship of deliverance, that luck was favoring
the luckless and at last the means of his escape were at hand. So he
asked, with outward unconcern, just what the yacht's course was. They
were bound for Messina, the second officer had replied, and from there
they went on to Corfu for a couple of weeks, and then on to Ragusa.

He went on board and looked over the armature core. It was of the
slotted drum type, he at once perceived, built up of laminations of
soft steel painted to break up eddy currents, and as he tested the soft
amber mica insulation about the commutators of hard-rolled copper, he
knew that the defective generator could be repaired in three-quarters
of an hour. But certain scraps of talk that came to his ears amid the
clink of glasses, from one of the shadowy saloons, had stung into vague
activity his old, irrepressible hunger for the companionship of his own
kind, his own race.

It was uncommonly pleasant, he had told himself as he had caught the
first drone of the lowered, confidential voices, to hear the old home
talk, and even broken snatches of old home interests. As he explored
the ship and minutely examined automatic circuit-breaker and
switchboard and fuse, he even made it a point to see that his
explorations took him into the pantry-like cabin next to the saloon
from which these droning voices drifted. As he gave apparently
studious and unbroken attention to a stretch of defective wiring, he
was in fact making casual mental note of the famili