He had noticed it many times before. But now it took on a new significance in the light of the theory he had formed with regard to Harvey L. Drago’s disappearance. “What’s that yacht doing out there?” he muttered. “Who is her owner? Any one living in the hotel? That seems likely, although she was there when I came here, day before yesterday. I don’t remember to have seen any communication with her from the shore. She may only have put in there for shelter, or repairs.” The detective was a yachtsman himself, and took a deep interest in all kinds of craft. Dropping behind a bush and lying almost at full length, he trained his field glasses on the yacht. With the eye of a sailor, as well as of a keen investigator, he studied the graceful vessel thoroughly from bow to stern, and from water line to the tops of tapering masts and white smokestack. “She looks familiar to me in a general way,” he reflected. “There is something about her general lines that I seem to recognize. But I can’t identify her as any boat I know. I’ll ask at the hotel. Somebody there may know something about her. Of course, it is not remarkable for a pleasure boat to be anchored in a beautiful bay like this. Still, no harm will be done by my asking.” He got up and climbed slowly to the little eminence whereon he had stood before, as a new idea came to him. Having reached the top of the small, spreading hill, he dropped flat upon the ground, the field glasses in his fingers. “If I am not mistaken,” was his inward remark, “I can see the hotel well from here with the glasses. I’ll take a squint at that little cove under the windows of the room occupied by the baroness. From here it looks as if they must be nearly in line with the yacht. That may not mean anything--but then, again, it may.” Nick Carter swept the glasses over the cove. Then he gradually brought them to bear on the windows of the rooms occupied by Mrs. de Puyster van Dietrich until she departed into the unknown so strangely. He allowed his glasses to wander from room to room and from floor to floor, until they finally came to rest on the window of the sitting room belonging to the dashing young lady with whom he had played golf that morning--the Baroness Latour. Nothing at this window interested him, and he was just about to return to his scrutiny of the cove, when he saw a woman come forward in the room and throw up the sash. It was the baroness. “I don’t blame her for opening her window on such a beautiful afternoon,” thought Carter. “The peculiar thing is that she should have had it closed at all. Hello! What’s she doing now?” Baroness Latour--looking more charming than ever, Nick thought, in her afternoon gown--had disappeared from the window. Now she returned with a peculiar-looking box in her hands. She settled it firmly on the window sill, and as she did so, the puzzled frown that had wrinkled up the forehead of the detective passed away. He saw what the box really was.