“If the passenger does not forget to send it, or if, when the boat touches he is not asleep, after his vigils here, or if he is not taking a walk, or eating his lunch, or, like Baal of old, otherwise engaged, when we, too, may cry Baal, Baal, unavailingly. For my part, I accept your offer, Mr. Ducie, if your vehicle comes first; if not I hope you will take a seat in the automobile with us.” “That is a compact,” said Ducie graciously. Floyd-Rosney felt assured that this was Randal. He was more suave than his brother--or was it that old associations still had power to gentle his temper? He could not understand his wife’s revolt. Now and again he looked at her with an unconscious inquiry in his eyes. So little was he accustomed to subject his own actions to criticism that it did not occur to him that he had gone too far. The worm had turned, seeming unaware how lowly and helpless was its estate. He had all the sentiment of grinding it under his heel, as he said loftily: “We shall have no need to impose upon you, Mr. Ducie. Our own conveyance will be here in ample time,”--then, like a jaw-breaker--“Thanks.” “I march with the first detachment,” declared Paula hardily. “I shall accept your offer of transportation, Mr. Ducie, if the auto does not come first.” Floyd-Rosney thought this must surely be Adrian Ducie, and not his brother. For some reason of their own they _must_ have exchanged their missions, and Randal had gone down the river, leaving his brother here. For she--a stickler on small points of the appropriate--could never say this if it were her old lover. Her sense of decorum, her respect for her husband, her habitual exercise of good taste would alike forbid the suggestion. Doubtless, it was Adrian Ducie. “I don’t think an automobile will come,” remarked Ducie. “The roads are very rough between here and Volney.” Paula’s next words seemed to mend the matter a trifle in Floyd-Rosney’s estimation. “I think we have all had enough of Duciehurst for one time! I would not risk remaining here, as evening closes in, for any consideration. All the riverside harpies will be flocking here when this story of treasure trove is bruited abroad. The old place will be fairly torn stone from stone, and there will be horrible orgies of strife and bloodshed. There ought to be a guard set, though there is nothing now to guard.” “Do you suppose Captain Treherne’s story of the river pirates was all fact or was partly the effect of his hallucination?” Ducie asked. “The cords he was bound with were pretty circumstantial evidence,” said Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, not waiting, as usual, for her husband’s word, but taking the lead in the conversation with aplomb and vivacity--he remembered scornfully that before her marriage she had been accounted in social circles intellectual, a _bel esprit_ among the frivols. “The gag failed of its function of silence,” she continued, “it told the whole story. You would have known that it was stern truth if you had seen it.”