“Thank you! I could not have explained it so clearly,” smiled Maggie, though she persistently averted her eyes. “Well, during the morning, the Chief Officer had been telling me things about the deviation of the compass, the importance of the agonic lines, the magnetic vagaries of some parts of the globe, and the great value to sailors of a recent discovery that at a certain point in front of the foremast the compass ceases to be affected by the polarization which is set up in all iron ships.” Ting! Some tiny nerve-bell jingled in my head. Polarization! Karl and I exchanged looks. We had rapidly made the same calculation. Allowing for difference of sun-time, Miss Margaret’s disturbing dream-vision, whatever it disclosed, must have been exactly contemporaneous with Karl’s poker-juggling in the Mitre Hotel. “_Now_ what is it?” demanded Mrs. Hutchinson, whose shrewd Scottish eyes were quick to detect the secret telegraphy between the others, for Maggie flushed most charmingly again, and we three established a circuit of intelligence. “Why do you all gowp like that? You make my flesh creep. The next thing you will be telling me is that there are ghosts in the room!” CHAPTER XI THE KEY OF THE TREASURE-HOUSE Well might Mrs. Hutchinson rail at us with a certain peevishness; here was true midsummer madness, if ever the dog-days’ frolic gamboled within the bounds of staid London. And what a wild jostling of ideas, apparently remote as the poles, contributed to the medley; agonic lines, polarization of ships and fire-irons, a curious experiment in an hotel at Oxford, and a girl humming _Il Barbiere di Siviglia_ in mid-Atlantic--these were the magic passwords, it would seem, to a new wonder-cave of Ali Baba. I fancied I could hear those fiddles singing the accompaniment to the lovelorn count’s impassioned verses. In this latest version of the immortal comedy I was playing Figaro, and Mrs. Hutchinson, if judged by her present impatient mood, provided a fair substitute for Dr. Bartholdo. Yet, what did it all mean? Karl, to my own knowledge, had not despatched his telegnomic sense on a roving commission that Sunday afternoon at Oxford. He had subjected a poker to what he termed “magnetic induction” merely in order to illustrate his unimpaired bodily and mental vigor when I expressed some anxiety about the effect on his health of practising too often a new and perhaps dangerous force. Again, if not at that moment, he had striven subsequently to glean some intelligence of Maggie’s doings, only to encounter repeated failure day after day, until she met Signor Bocci in Liverpool a few hours previously. Nevertheless, I was sure that communication between those two was established in that instant, a sympathetic contact, conscious in the maiden’s case, unconscious in the youth’s. Perhaps, while humming Almaviva’s strains, the Rosina of the _Merlin_ applied the words to herself.