"Well--there are other papers,--other towns," cried Hammerton passionately. "What I've got on you will sell anywhere. Why, damn you, _damn you, damn you_--don't you know you'll have to kill me to hush this up?" "No," said Varney, "I'm going to do better than that. I'm going to make a friend of you. I'm going to make you editor of the _Gazette_ in Smith's place with double your present salary and an interest in the paper." There was black silence, more thrilling than any speech. "Will you take it?" asked Varney. Then the boy's overstrained self-command snapped like a bow-string and his breast shook with sudden hysteria. "Will I take it?" he cried with a gasping laugh that was rather more like a sob. "Will I take the Court of St. James? Will I take money from home? Oh, my God, will I take it!" "Hooray!" rang Peter's great voice out of the gloom. "Hip, hip, hooray for Editor Hammerton!" Peter's tribute, in reality, was not so much for Hammerton's acceptance as for the astonishing neatness with which Varney had disposed of the editorship of _his_ paper. But to Varney, rising limply from Hammerton's chest at the edge of the dark road, that cheer meant only that he had kicked the last obstacle out of his path and that he and Mary were going to New York to-morrow. CHAPTER XVII A LITTLE LUNCHEON PARTY ON THE YACHT "CYPRIANI" The expectation appeared thoroughly conservative: not a cloud so large as a man's hand any longer darkened the horizon. At two o'clock next day Mr. Carstairs's _Cypriani_ rode gayly at her old anchorage. At the rail stood Varney and Maginnis, hosts of pleasant and guileless mien, their eyes upon the trim gig which came dancing over the water toward them. In the gig sat J. Pinkney Hare and his sister, Mrs. Marne, blithely coming to lunch aboard with their two new friends. The yacht's return to Hunston had been in all ways different from her going. She had slipped away like the hunted thing she was, running to cover with a hold full of fears, shying at every craft that passed, and yelled after from the shore by a stoutish young man with inimical opinions in his eye. She had steamed back, early this morning, not merely without fear, but proudly, her whistle screaming for the lime-light, her fore-truck flying, so to say, the burgee of vindication; and the stoutish and inimical young man had come aboard for breakfast with his new employer at nine o'clock sharp. Such was the measure of the whitewashing work accomplished by three columns in Mr. Maginnis's _Gazette_ that morning.