steries, monsieur."

"I don't mind telling you all I feel at liberty to.... You seem to have
a pretty good line on mademoiselle, and I've told you what I know about
de Lorgnes. As for the skipper, he's the black sheep of a good old New
England family. Ran away to sea as a boy, and was disowned, and grew up
in a rough school. It would take all night to name half the jobs he's
had a hand in, mostly of a shady nature, in every quarter of the seven
seas: gun running, pearl poaching, what not--even a little slaving, I
suspect, in his early days. He's a pompous old bluff in repose, but
nobody's fool, and a bad actor when his mad is up. He tells me he fell
in with the Delorme a long time ago, while acting as personal escort
for a fugitive South American potentate who crossed the borders of his
native land with the national treasury in one hand and his other in
Monk's, and of course--they all do--made a bee line for Paris. That's
how we came to make her acquaintance, my revered employer, Mister Monk,
and I--through the skipper, I mean."

Phinuit paused to consider, and ended with a whimsical grimace.

"I'm talking too much; but it doesn't matter, seein's it's you.
Strictly between ourselves, the said revered employer is an annointed
fraud. Publicly he's the pillar of the respectable house of Monk.
Privately, he's not above profiteering, foreclosing the mortgage on the
old homestead, and swearing to an odoriferous income-tax return. And
when he thinks he's far enough away from home--my land, how that little
man do carry on!

"The War made him more money than he ever thought there was; so he
bought this yacht ready-made and started on the grand tour, but never
got any farther than Paris--naturally his first stop. News from home to
the effect that somebody was threatening to do him out of a few nickels
sent him hightailing back to put a stop to it. But before that
happened, he wanted to see life with a large L; and Cousin Whitaker
gave him a good start by introducing him to little ingenue Liane. And
then she put the smuggling bee in his bonnet."

"Smuggling!"

Lanyard began to experience glimpses....

"Champagne. If ever all the truth comes out, I fancy it will transpire
that Liane's getting a rake-off from some vintner. You see, Friend
Employer was displaying a cultivated taste in vintage champagnes, but
he'd been culpably negligent in not laying down a large stock for
private consumption before the Great Drought set in.