"Oh, I really don't know whether I like him or not," declared Fitzgerald. "I have run across him two or three times, but we were both busy. He has told me a little about himself. He's been knocked about a good deal. Has a title, but doesn't use it." "A title? That is news to me. Probably it is true." "I was surprised to learn that you knew him at all." "Not very well. Met him in Munich mostly." A long pause. "Isn't Miss Killigrew just rippin'? There's a comrade for some man. Lucky devil, who gets her! She is new to me every day." "I think I warned you." "You were a nice one, never to say a word that you knew the admiral!" "Are you complaining?" Fitzgerald laughed; no not exactly; he wasn't complaining. "You remember the caravan trails in the Lybian desert; the old ones on the way to Khartoum? The pathway behind her is like that, marked with the bleached bones of princely and ducal and common hopes." Cathewe stretched out in his chair. "Since she was eighteen, Jack, she has crossed the man-trail like a sandstorm, and quite as innocently, too." "Oh, rot! I'm no green and salad youth." "Your bones will be only the tougher, that's all." Another pause. "But what's your opinion regarding Breitmann?" Cathewe laced his fingers and bent his chin on them. "There's a great rascal or a great hero somewhere under his skin." CHAPTER XV THEY GO A-SAILING Five o'clock in the afternoon, and a mild blue sea flashing under the ever-deepening orange of the falling sun. Golden castles and gray castles and castles of shadowed-white billowed in the east; turrets rose and subsided and spires of cloud-cities formed and re-formed. The yacht _Laura_, sleek and swan-white, her ensign and colors folding and unfolding, lifting and sinking, as the shore breeze stirred them, was making ready for sea; and many of the villagers had come down to the water front to see her off. Very few sea-going vessels, outside of freighters, ever stopped in this harbor; and naturally the departures of the yacht were events equalled only by her arrivals. The railroad station was close to the wharves, and the old sailors hated the sight of the bright rails; for the locomotive had robbed them of the excitement of the semi-weekly packets that used to coast up and down between New York and Philadelphia. "Wonder what poor devil of a pirate is going to have his bones turned over this trip?" said the station-agent to Mr. Donovan, who, among others on the station platform, watched the drab anchor as it clanked jerkily upward to the bows, leaving a swivel and a boil on the waters which had released it so grudgingly. "I guess it ain't goin' t' be any ol' pirate this time," replied Mr. Donovan, with a pleasurable squeeze of the pocket-book over his heart.