"Your pardon, Number Nineteen Thirty-two! For my suspicion I apologize. But, you see my position--a very delicate one." Woodhouse rose, grasped the doctor's hand, and wrung it heartily. "And now," he said, "to keep this fellow Capper in sight until the _Princess Mary_ sails and I aboard her as Captain Woodhouse, of Wady Halfa. The man might trip us all up." "He will not; be sure of that," Koch growled, helping Woodhouse into his coat and leading the way to the folding doors. "I will have Cæsar attend to him the minute he comes back to report where Capper is stopping." "Until when?" the captain asked, pausing at the gate, to which Koch had escorted him. "Here to-morrow night at nine," the doctor answered, and the gate shut behind him. Captain Woodhouse, alone under the shadowing trees of Queen's Terrace, drew in a long breath, shook his shoulders and started for the station and the midnight train to Alexandria. CHAPTER V A FERRET Consider the mental state of Mr. Billy Capper as he sank into a seat on the midnight suburban from Ramleh to Alexandria. Even to the guard, unused to particular observation of his passengers save as to their possible propensity for trying to beat their fares, the bundle of clothes surmounted by a rusty brown bowler which huddled under the sickly light of the second-class carriage bespoke either a candidate for a plunge off the quay or a "bloomer" returning from his wassailing. But the eyes of the man denied this latter hypothesis; sanity was in them, albeit the merciless sanity that refuses an alternative when fate has its victim pushed into a corner. So submerged was Capper under the flood of his own bitter cogitations that he had not noticed the other two passengers boarding the train at the little tiled station--a tall, quietly dressed white man and a Numidian with a cloak thrown over his white livery. The latter had faded like a shadow into the third-class carriage behind the one in which Capper rode.