"After about three months of this sort of thing, I began to hanker for the sea again. You may wonder at that, but it's a fact. It grows on men, me for one. I felt lost without the beat of the engine, you know. So I applied for several jobs, and finally the builders of the ship I'm on now, the _Raritan_, wanted a chief to take her out to New York. I got the job and we went to Sunderland to join her. Since then I've been crossing and recrossing the Western Ocean. And speaking in a general way, that's all there is to it." Mr. Carville, pinching his shaven chin with a thumb and fore-finger, looked down meditatively at his boots. In some subtle way his manner belied his words. I felt a lively conviction that there was in a particular way something more to it. It seemed quite incredible that he had no more to tell us of his brother. "Surely," I said, "you have heard of your brother since?" He gave me a quick look. "That's right," he said. "I have. I was going to tell you about it. I saw him, fifteen days ago, in the North Sea." "Great Scott, did you really?" exclaimed Mac, and he picked up the copy of _The Morning_. "Look here!" Mr. Carville took the paper and read the news without exhibiting any emotion. I saw his eyelid flicker as he glanced down the special article by "Vol-Plane." Lord Cholme's concern for the Empire seemed to leave him cold. "Humph!" he remarked and handed the paper to Mac, remaining lost in thought for a moment. "Ah!" he said at length. "That certainly accounts for him. But it doesn't say anything about the three green lights." "What green lights?" I asked, little thinking that I should see these same lights myself in the near future. "I'll tell you," said he, and looked round for a place to knock out his pipe. I passed him the ash-bowl that Mac brought back from Mexico when he went down there to do a bird's-eye view for a mining company. Mr. Carville held it up to examine the crude red and blue daub on the pale glaze. "I suppose," he began, "that of all the meetings I've had with my brother, this last one was the most unusual. It was unusual enough, that time in the _Parque Colon_, when he grabbed my neck in the dark; but this last meeting beats that, I think. It's funny how a quiet, respectable man like me should have such experiences, isn't it? "I ought to explain that the _Raritan_, like all oil tank steamers, has her engines aft. The captain and mates live amidships under the bridge, while we engineers all live in the poop, under the quarter-deck, as they call it in the Navy. There is a long gangway between the two houses, but as a general thing we live apart. We have our own pantry and steward and we can go straight out of our berths into the engine-room without coming on deck at all.