An hour later as I finished my solitary dinner, the electric lights flickered and died, and the engines began their throb. Under cover of the darkness we were slipping out of Gibraltar. I leaned my arms on the table and scanned the remains of my feast by the light of my one sad candle, not thinking of what I saw, or of the various calls for help I had been dispatching, or of the sailor grimly mounting guard outside my door. I was remembering a girl, a girl with ruddy hair and a wild-rose flush and great, gray, starry eyes, a girl that by all the rules of the game I should have handed over to those who represented the countries she was duping, a girl that I had found I had to shield when I came face to face with the issue. CHAPTER IX THE BLACK BUTTERFLIES The Turin-Paris express--the most direct, the Italians call it--was too popular by half to suit the taste of morose beings who wished for solitude. With great trouble and pains I had ferreted out a single vacant compartment; but as four o’clock sounded and the whistle blew for departure, a belated traveler joined me--worse still, an acquaintance who could not be quite ignored. The unwelcome intruder was Mr. John Van Blarcom, my late fellow-voyager, and he accepted the encounter with a better grace than I. “Why, hello!” he greeted me cheerfully. “Going through to France? Glad to see you--but you’re about the last man that I was looking for. I got the idea somehow you were planning to stop a while in Rome.” I returned his nod with a curtness I was at no pains to dissemble. Then I reproached myself, for it was undeniable that on the _Re d’Italia_ he had more than once stood my friend. He had offered me a timely warning, which I had flouted; he had obligingly confirmed my statement in my grueling third degree. Yet despite this, or because of it, I didn’t like him; nor did I like his patronizing, complacent manner, which seemed fairly to shriek at me, “I told you so!” “Changed my plans,” I acknowledged with a lack of cordiality that failed to ruffle him. He had hung up his overcoat and installed himself facing me, and was now making preparations for lighting a fat cigar. “Well,” he commented, with a chuckle of raillery, after this operation, “the last time I saw you you were in a pretty tight corner, eh? You can’t say it was my fault, either; I’d have put you wise if you’d listened. But you weren’t taking any--you knew better than I did--and you strafed me, as the Dutchies say, to the kaiser’s taste.” “Good advice seldom gets much thanks, I believe,” was my grumpy comment, which he unexpectedly chose to accept as an apology and with a large, fine, generous gesture to blow away. “That’s all right,” he declared. “I’m not holding it against you. We’ve all got to learn. Next time you won’t be so easy caught, I guess. It makes a man do some thinking when he gets a dose like you did; and those chaps at Gibraltar certainly gave you a rough deal!”