Only one thing was clear. One central fact shone out, a beacon amidst the gloom of the "departmental complications" enshrouding the conduct of Hugo Tancred, the certainty that he had, for the present anyway, shifted the responsibility of his family from his own shoulders to hers. As she sat square and upright under the porthole, with the cool air from an inserted "wind-sail" ruffling her hair, she looked as though she braced herself to the burden. She wished she knew exactly what had happened, what Hugo Tancred had actually done. For some years she had known that he was by no means scrupulous in money matters, and that very evening Sir Langham had made it clear to her that this crookedness had not stopped short at his official work. There had been a scandal, so far-reaching a scandal that it had got into the home papers. This struck Jan as rather extraordinary, for Hugo Tancred was by no means a stupid man. It is one thing to be pleasantly oblivious of private debts, to omit cheques in repayment of various necessaries got at the Stores by an obliging sister-in-law. One thing to muddle away in wild-cat speculations a wife's money that, but for the procrastination of an easy-going father, would have been tightly tied up--quite another to bring himself so nearly within the clutches of the law as to make it possible for the Government of India to dismiss him. And what was he to do? What did the future hold for him? Who would give employment to however able a man with such a career behind him? Jan's imagination refused to take such flights. Resolutely she put the subject from her and began to consider what her own best course would be with Fay, her nephew and niece, and, very shortly, a new baby on her hands. Jan was not a young woman to let things drift. She had kept house for a whimsical, happy-go-lucky father since she was fourteen; mothered her beautiful young sister; and, at her father's death, two years before, had with quiet decision arranged her own life, wholly avoiding the discussion and the friction which generally are the lot of an unmarried woman of five-and-twenty left without natural guardians and with a large circle of friends and relations. It was nearly two o'clock when she undressed and went to bed, and before that she had drafted two cablegrams--one to a house-agent, the other to her bankers. CHAPTER III BOMBAY For Jan the next two days passed as in a more or less disagreeable dream. She could never afterwards recall very clearly what happened, except that Sir Langham Sykes seemed absolutely omnipresent, and made her, she felt, ridiculous before the whole ship, by proclaiming far and wide that she had bestowed upon him the healing gift of sleep. He was so effusive, so palpably grateful, that she simply could not undeceive him by telling him that after they parted the night before she had never given him another thought.