"Meet me upstairs in ten minutes," said Varney, "and we'll talk about plans." CHAPTER II THEY EMBARK UPON A CRIME Varney was wrong in one thing: Mr. Carstairs's _Cypriani_ was not ready to start anywhere at half a day's notice. For that reason it did not start for Hunston on the following afternoon. As always happens, the preparations for the little expedition took four times as long as anybody would have thought possible. For these delays no blame could be attached to Peter Maginnis. He had no getting ready to do beyond bidding his father's man to pack him for a week, and obtaining from his hatter's, at an out-of-season cut-price, an immense and peculiar Panama with an offensive plaid band. Possibly it was the only hat of its kind in the world. One might picture the manufacturer as having it made up as an experiment, becoming morose when he looked at it, and ordering his superintendent to make no more like it at the peril of his life. Peter, however, was delighted with it. Gazing at himself with smirking satisfaction in the hat-shop mirror, he ordered the old one sent home and was all ready to go to Hunston and kidnap Mary Carstairs. But other preparations could not be completed with such speedy satisfaction. The yacht had to coal, take on supplies, and pick up two or three extra men for the crew. A Sunday came in and threw everything back a day. Lastly the sailing-master's wife, whom Mr. Carstairs was sending along to take charge of Mary on the homeward trip, chanced to be down with an influenza. As the details of getting ready multiplied about him, Varney's interest in his novel undertaking imperceptibly grew. The thing had come upon him so unexpectedly that it had not yet by any means lost its strangeness. To the old friend of his mother's girlhood, Elbert Carstairs, he was sincerely devoted, though knowing him for an indulgent man whose indulgences were chiefly of himself. But when, responding to his excited summons that night, he had sat and listened while Mr. Carstairs unfolded his mad little domestic plot, he had been first utterly amazed and then utterly repelled. And it was not until a final sense of the old man's genuine need was borne in upon him, of his loneliness, his helplessness, and his entire dependence upon him, Varney, that he had consented to undertake the extraordinary commission. In a sense, it was all simply preposterous. Here was he, Laurence Varney, in sane mind, of law-abiding habits and hitherto of tolerable standing in the community, solemnly pledged to go and steal the person of a child, in defiance and contempt of the statutes of all known nations. And the place where this lawless deed was to be done was not Ruritania or the hazy dominions of Prince Otto, but a commonplace, humdrum American town, not an hour and a half from his office chair by the expresses.