For once, at least, Harborough went back on his word. He almost went back and down an open hatchway, for, although he was convinced that Villiers would put in an appearance, that worthy's sudden return took the usually cool and collected Sir Hugh by surprise. "Good heavens, Villiers, dear old thing!" he exclaimed. "How in the name of all that's wonderful----!" Running up the accommodation-ladder and saluting the quarter-deck as he came over the side, Villiers grasped his chief's extended hand. "'Fraid I haven't much of a kit," he remarked apologetically; "but this, I think, sir, is your property." He held out the attaché-case. Harborough gazed at it with mingled surprise and amusement. "You've a yarn to spin about that," he observed. "Come below. We're about to have dinner. You'll be able to have a word with Beverley before he goes on watch." "I won't say that I've nothing to tell," remarked Jack, "because I have." For the next three quarters of an hour he was hard at it, his audience listening in almost unbroken silence. Following his plunge from the deck of the _Zug_, he was in the water forty minutes before he was picked up by a Portuguese "mulutta"--a fishing-boat whose chief characteristic is the large number of fantastically-shaped sails she carries. It was doubtless the presence of the fishing-boat that deterred the _Zug's_ crew from putting about and opening fire upon the swimmer; but Villiers had not observed the presence of his rescuers until the tramp was hull down. The fishermen treated him very kindly, and eventually landed him at Figuera, a Portuguese harbour about one hundred miles north of Lisbon. A hospitable merchant rendered him every possible assistance and provided him with money sufficient to enable him to reach Algeciras, which he did after a long and circuitous railway journey which, in Villiers' opinion, embraced the greater part of Portugal and Spain. At Algeciras he was fortunate in catching the last ferry-boat for that day across to the Rock, and during the six-mile passage across the Bay of Gibraltar he saw, to his unbounded delight, the _Titania_ putting in and dropping anchor off the Old Mole. "I'm afraid," observed Harborough, when Villiers had finished his narrative, "that you expended a lot of unnecessary zeal over that attaché-case." "Oh!" exclaimed Jack doubtfully. "Why?"