"Wait!" Carter took out his wallet of limp leather with his initials on it in delicately wrought gold letters and opened it. "I didn't mean to show you this, but I see that I must. It was last summer. I--I lost my head the night before we sailed, and let Honor see.... Then I asked her.... I didn't say, 'Will you marry me?' because I knew there was no hope of that so long as she thought there was a chance of saving you by standing by you. I asked her--something else. And she sent me this wire to the boat at Naples." Jimsy did not put out his hand to take the slip of paper which Carter unfolded and smoothed and held toward him. It was utterly still in the _sala_ but from an upper room came the sound of Richard King's voice, faint, thick, begging for water, and from somewhere in the distance a muffled shot ... three shots. Carter held the message up before Jimsy's eyes: Carter Van Meter care Purser S. S. _Canopic Naples_ Yes. HONOR. CHAPTER XIV If Stephen Lorimer, far to the north in the safe serenity of the old house of South Figueroa Street, could have envisaged the three of them that day his chief concern would not have been for their bodily danger. It would have seemed to him that the intangible cloud settling down over them was a more tragic and sinister thing than the _insurrectos_ besieging them, than the thirst which was cracking their lips and swelling and blackening their tongues. He was to remember and marvel, long afterward, that his thought on that date had tugged uneasily toward them all day and evening. Conditions, so far as he knew, were favorable; the escort for the personage would be a stout one and under his wing the boy and girl would be safe, and James King was waiting for them, spinning out his thread of life until they should come to him. Nevertheless, he found himself acutely unhappy regarding them, aware of an urgent and instant need of being with them.