somewhere off to port, which he at first took for
a buoy, then perceived to be tolling with a regularity inconsistent
with the eccentric action of waves. Timed by pulsebeats, it struck once
every fifteen seconds or thereabouts: undoubtedly the fog signal of some
minor light-house.

In confirmation of this conclusion, Lanyard heard, from the deck above,
the resonant accents of Captain Monk, clearly articulate in that riot
of voices, apparently storming at hapless Mr. Swain.

"Don't you hear that bell, you ass? Doesn't that tell you what you've
done? You've piled us on the rocks off the eastern end of Plum Island.
And God in Heaven only knows how you managed to get so far off the
course!"

Breathing to the night air thanks which would have driven Captain Monk
mad could he have heard them, Lanyard let go the bronze blade and
struck out for the melancholy bell.

Ten minutes later the fingers of one hand--he was swimming on his
side--at the bottom of its stroke touched pebbles.

He lowered his feet and waded through extensive shallows to a wide and
sandy beach.

XXVIII

FINALE

The window of the living-room in his suite at the Walpole, set high in
cliff-like walls, commanded a southward vista of Fifth Avenue whose
enchantment, clothed in ever changing guises of light and shade, was so
potent that Lanyard, on the first day of his tenancy, thought it could
never tire. Yet by noon of the third he was viewing it with the eyes of
soul-destroying ennui, though the disfavour it had so quickly won in
his sight was, he knew, due less to cloying familiarity than to the
uncertainty and discontent that were eating out his heart.

Three days before, immediately on arriving in New York and installing
himself in this hotel, to whose management he was well known from other
days, he had cabled Eve de Montalais and Wertheimer.

The response to the latter--a cheerful request that credit be arranged
for him by cable--was as prompt and satisfactory as he had expected it
to be.

But from Madame de Montalais he heard nothing.

"Mission successful," he had wired--"returning France by La Savoie in
five days having arranged safe transportation your property--please
advise if you can meet me in Paris to receive same or your commands
otherwise."

And to this, silence only!--silence to him to whom words of her
dictation, however few and terse and filtered through no matter how
many indifferent mediums of intelligence, would hav