"I don't want to alarm you unnecessarily, but I am afraid there is trouble ahead of us. I have just seen that fellow Smeltzer again.... Yes, down on the lower deck." Margaret called Philip to her and caught him up with a despairing gesture. "Do you really suppose he is after us?" she asked with dry lips. "I am afraid he is. I shouldn't have said anything about it if it hadn't been for a word I overheard him say to the captain about his being an officer and authorized to take 'them' into custody when he reached the 'Soo'." "But what can I do?" asked Margaret. "There is no possible chance now to get away." "I think," said Harcourt, after a moment's thought, "that I would take a stateroom and keep Philip out of sight until I can have a talk with the man. I will try to make an opportunity without exciting his suspicions. If I find out definitely that it is you he was talking about I think perhaps it might be well for you to invoke the captain's assistance,--and don't lose heart; we have the day before us in which to concoct some scheme to outwit him." "But on the water--" Margaret said despairingly. She went at once to see the stewardess about a room, Philip--frightened and mystified at her still face--clinging to her, and Bess following, not much less alarmed. The stewardess was a buxom Irish girl, and if ever a face indicated a good heart it was Norah Brannigan's. Looking into it and realizing her sore need of a friend, Margaret called her into the room after she had sent Bess back to Mr. Harcourt, took the woman's freckled hand, and poured out her sorrows and her fears.... And would she not help her? In her desperate need she had thrown herself upon an utter stranger, but she had not read amiss the honest face. "'Will I help you?' Sure, mem, and it is Norah Brannigan will do that same! I wud do it for the swate eyes of ye, darlint, to say nothin' o' divilin' that black-hearted vilyan--come aboard a dacent boat for the purpose o' stalin' your b'y, bad luck to him! And what is it ye was wantin' me to do, mem?" "I want you to hide us," said Margaret hurriedly, brought face to face with the emergency by Norah's question,--"hide us anywhere you can about the boat--down in the hold, if you haven't any other place." She said it with a vague remembrance of the stowaways crossing the ocean thus. "And then tell him that we are not here--that we have fallen overboard--anything--to throw him off the track." Then, with sudden fear, "Would you mind telling what was not true to save my boy?" "Divil a bit wud I moind!" said Norah, with a snap of her brown eyes. "Sure, mem, it wud rej'ice the heart of Norah Brannigan to lie to a vilyan loike that--bad luck to him!--st'alin' women's childer that they have borne--Ah-h! they're a bad lot, mem, is men--a bad lot!--barrin' Michael Callaghan, who is as foine a b'y as ye wud wush to see. There's few loike him--more's the pity! But whisht now, who is this divil you're a-fearin' and what is he loike?"