Salvières explained that during the second interview he had just had with the _Wild Rose’s_ first mate in the Castle infirmary, he had discovered that after a cruise in the Mediterranean, among the Ionian Islands, and back to Gibraltar, Princess Laurence had crossed the straits to Tangier, where she had hired a Moorish house inclosed by an impenetrable rampart of cactus, and set upon the flank of a fortress-like hillock beyond the Sôk, and outside the city gates, beyond the spot where the East and the West rub shoulders. The _Wild Rose_ lay at anchor on the still bosom of the bay, at the least conspicuous moorings that could be found--this by the special command of the Princess. Every evening Captain Braines or the first mate went up to the house for orders, more often than once walking out of town by the Mazàn and the dusky lanes shadowed by sweeping cedars and hedged by prickly-pear. The mate had a natural picturesqueness of expression which Salvières faithfully reproduced as he retold the tale. To hear him it was difficult to realize that Laurence’s hiding-place was but a few short miles away from Europe as the swallow flies across that sunlit strait. The house, it seemed, had been luxurious. The Princess, served by her own confidential servants brought with her on the yacht, had never left its seclusion, but spent her time in the queer, fragrant old garden, with its ever-splashing fountains and irregular bosquets of palms and flowering trees, where roses and camellias made a blaze of color in the day, and the big Oriental moon cast its triumphant glamour at night. There she had lain in a hammock, apparently wasting her beauty upon the almost awesome solitude of the place, until one evening when the captain, walking up the path of crushed shells between the high thickets, had seen a man rise hastily and disappear behind a clump of ilexes. The bluff Englishman had told the mate of this incident on coming aboard, in shocked and very strong language, but, contrary to expectation, the days had passed without further developments. Two weeks later, however, the Princess had bidden the captain be ready to take to sea again, and twenty-four hours afterward the _Wild Rose_ had steamed out of Tangier, bound for the Azores, carrying, besides its former contingent, a very good-looking young man, who was, so it was said, her Serene-Highness’s newly engaged secretary, an Englishman; by name Preston Harrington. Throughout the trip the Princess, who had evidently taken a sudden turn toward literature, had been closeted in her own suite with “Mr. Harrington” for many hours a day, dictating, doubtless, the novel to which she freely referred when talking to the captain, whom she daily honored with a visit on the bridge. It was to be--she claimed--the work of her life, a great-lady way of avoiding _ennui_ in this weary, weary existence of plenitude.