They spent part of their honeymoon in Cleveland, and every afternoon Eve sat between Fitz and his father, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, and was taught painstakingly, as the crowning gift of those two simple hearts, to play the game. There must be one word more. There are people to this day who say that Eve knew from the beginning who "James Holden" was, and that she played her cards accordingly. In view of this I fling all caution to the wind, and in spite of the cold fear that is upon me of being sued for libel, I tell these ladies--_people_, I mean--that they lie in their teeth. TARGETS "On the contrary," said Gardiner, "lightning very often strikes twice in the same place, and often three times. The so-called all-wise Providence is still in the experimental stage. My grandmother, for instance, presented my grandfather with fifteen children: seven live sons and eight dead daughters. That's when the lightning had fun with itself. And when the epidemic of ophthalmia broke out in the Straits Settlements, what class of people do you suppose developed the highest percentage of total loss of sight in one or both eyes?--why the inmates of the big asylum for the deaf and dumb in Singapore: twenty per cent of those poor stricken souls went stone blind. Then what do you think the lightning did? Set the blooming asylum on fire and burned it to the ground. And then, I dare say, the elements retired to some region of waste, off in space somewhere, and sat down and thundered with laughter. But it wasn't through with the deaf and dumb, and blind, and roofless even then. It was decided by government, which is the next most irresponsible instrument to lightning, to transfer the late inmates of the asylum to a remantled barrack in the salubrious Ceylon hills; and they were put aboard a ram-shackle, single-screw steamer named the _Nerissa_. She was wrecked--" "Coast of Java--in '80, wasn't it?" said Pedder, who has read nothing but dictionaries and books of black-and-white facts and statistics in the course of a long life otherwise entirely devoted to misdirected efforts to defeat Colonel Bogey at golf. "It was," said Gardiner, "and the lightning was very busy striking. It drowned off every member of the crew who had any sense of decency; and of the deaf and dumb passengers selected to be washed ashore a pair who were also blind. Those saved came to land at a jungly stretch of coast, dented by a slow-running creek. The crew called the place Quickstep Inlet because of the panicky and inhuman haste in which they left it." "Why inhuman?" asked Ludlow.