John was the riddle that I could not read. Among my last actions of this day was one that had been almost my earliest, and bedtime found me staring at his letter, as I stood, half undressed, by my table. The calm moon brought back Udolpho and what had been said there, as it now shone down upon the garden where Hortense had danced. I stared at John's letter as if its words were new to me, instead of being words that I could have fluently repeated from beginning to end without an error; it was as if, by virtue of mere gazing at the document, I hoped to wring more meaning from it, to divine what had been in the mind which had composed it; but instead of this, I seemed to get less from it, instead of more. Had the boy's purpose been to mystify me, he could scarce have done better. I think that he had no such intention, for it would have been wholly unlike him; but I saw no sign in it that I had really helped him, had really shaken his old quixotic resolve, nor did I see any of his having found a new way of his own out of the trap. I could not believe that the dark road of escape had taken any lodgement in his thought, but had only passed over it, like a cloud with a heavy shadow. But these are surmises at the best: if John had formed any plan, I can never know it, and Juno's remarks at breakfast on Sunday morning sounded strange, like something a thousand miles away. For she spoke of the wedding, and of the fact that it would certainly be a small one. She went over the names of the people who would have to be invited, and doubted if she were one of these. But if she should be, then she would go--for the sake of Miss Josephine St. Michael, she declared. In short, it was perfectly plain that Juno was much afraid of being left out, and that wild horses could not drag her away from it, if an invitation came to her. But, as I say, this side of the wedding seemed to have nothing to do with it, when I thought of all that lay beneath; my one interest to-day was to see John Mayrant, to get from him, if not by some word, then by some look or intonation, a knowledge of what he meant to do. Therefore, disappointment and some anxiety met me when I stepped from the Hermana's gangway upon her deck, and Charley asked me if he was coming. But the launch, sent back to wait, finally brought John, apologizing for his lateness.

Meanwhile, I was pleased to find among the otherwise complete party General Rieppe. What I had seen of him from a distance held promise, and the hero's nearer self fulfilled it. We fell to each other's lot for the most natural of reasons: nobody else desired the company of either of us. Charley was making himself the devoted servant of Hortense, while Kitty drew Beverly, Bohm, and Gazza in her sprightly wake. To her, indeed, I made a few compliments during the first few minutes after my coming aboard, while every sort of drink and cigar was being circulated among us by the cabin boy. Kitty's costume was the most markedly maritime thing that I have ever beheld in any waters, and her white shoes looked (I must confess) supremely well on her pretty little feet. I am no advocate of sumptuary laws; but there should be one prohibiting big-footed women from wearing white shoes. Did these women know what a spatulated effect their feet so shod produce, no law would be needed. Yes, Kitty was superlatively, stridently maritime; you could have known from a great distance that she belonged to the very latest steam yacht class, and that she was perfectly ignorant of the whole subject. On her left arm, for instance, was worked a red propeller with one blade down, and two chevrons. It was the rating mark for a chief engineer, but this, had she known it, would not have disturbed her.

"I chose it," she told me in reply to my admiration of it, "because it's so pretty. Oh, won't we enjoy ourselves while those stupid old blue-bloods in Kings Port are going to church!" And with this she gave a skip, and ordered the cabin boy to bring her a Remsen cooler. Beverly Rodgers called for dwarf's blood, and I chose a horse's neck, and soon found myself in the society of the General.

He was sipping whiskey and plain water. "I am a rough soldiers sir," he explained to me, "and I keep to the simple beverage of the camp. Had we not 'rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of'?" And he waved a stately hand at my horse's neck. "You are acquainted with the works of Shakespeare?"

I replied that I had a moderate knowledge of them, and assured him that a horse's neck was very simple.

"Doubtless, sir; but a veteran is ever old-fashioned."

"Papa," said Hortense, "don't let the sun shine upon your head."

"Thank you, daughter mine." They said no more; but I presently felt that for some reason she watched him.

He moved farther beneath the awning, and I followed him. "Are you a father, sir? No? Then you cannot appreciate what it is to confide such a jewel as yon girl to another's keeping." He summoned the cabin boy, who brought him some more of the simple beverage of the camp, and I, feeling myself scarce at liberty to speak on matters so near to him and so far from me as his daughter's marriage, called his attention to the beautiful aspect of Kings Port, spread out before us in a long white line against the blue water.

The General immediately seized his opportunity. "'Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain!' You are acquainted with the works of Goldsmith, sir?"

I professed some knowledge of this author also, and the General's talk flowed ornately onward. Though I had little to say to him about his daughter's marriage, he had much to say to me. Miss Josephine St. Michael would have been gratified to hear that her family was considered suitable for Hortense to contract an alliance with. "My girl is not stepping down, sir," the father assured me; and he commended the St. Michaels and the whole connection. He next alluded tragically but vaguely to misfortunes which had totally deprived him of income. I could not precisely fix what his inheritance had been; sometimes he spoke of cotton, but next it would be rice, and he touched upon sugar more than once; but, whatever it was, it had been vast and was gone. He told me that I could not imagine the feelings of a father who possessed a jewel and no dowry to give her. "A queen's estate should have been hers," he said. "But what! 'Who steals my purse steals trash.'" And he sat up, nobly braced by the philosophic thought. But he soon was shaking his head over his enfeebled health. Was I aware that he had been the cause of postponing the young people's joy twice? Twice had the doctors forbidden him to risk the emotions that would attend his giving his jewel away. He dwelt upon his shattered system to me, and, indeed, it required some dwelling on, for he was the picture of admirable preservation. "But I know what it is myself," he declared, "to be a lover and have bliss delayed. They shall be united now. A soldier must face all arrows. What!"

I had hoped he might quote something here, but was disappointed. His conversation would soon cease to interest me, should I lose the excitement of watching for the next classic; and my eye wandered from the General to the water, where, happily, I saw John Mayrant coming in the launch. I briskly called the General's attention to him, and was delighted with the unexpected result.

"'Oh, young Lochinvar has come out of the West,'" said the General, lifting his glass.

I touched it ceremoniously with mine. "The day will be hot," I said; "'The boy stood on the burning deck.'"

On this I made my escape from him, and, leaving him to his whiskey and his contemplating, I became aware that the eyes of the rest of the party were eager to watch the greeting between Hortense and John. But there was nothing to see. Hortense waited until her lover had made his apologies to Charley for being late, and, from the way they met, she might have been no more to him than Kitty was. Whatever might be thought, whatever might be known, by these onlookers, Hortense set the pace of how the open secret was to be taken. She made it, for all of us, as smooth and smiling as the waters of Kings Port were this fine day. How much did they each know? I asked myself how much they had shared in common. To these Replacers Kings Port had opened no doors; they and their automobile had skirted around the outside of all things. And if Charley knew about the wedding, he also knew that it had been already twice postponed. He, too, could have said, as Miss Eliza had once said to me, "The cake is not baked yet." The General's talk to me (I felt as I took in how his health had been the centred point) was probably the result of previous arrangements with Hortense herself; and she quite as certainly inspired whatever she allowed him to say to Charley.

As for Kitty, she knew that her brother was "set"; she always came back to that.

If Hortense found this Sunday morning a passage of particularly delicate steering, she showed it in no way, unless by that heightened radiance and triumph of beauty which I had seen in her before. No; the splendor of the day, the luxuries of the Hermana, the conviviality of the Replacers--all melted the occasion down to an ease and enjoyment in which even John Mayrant, with his grave face, was not perceptible, unless, like myself, one watched him.

It was my full expectation that we should now get under way and proceed among the various historic sights of Kings Port harbor, but of this I saw no signs anywhere on board the Hermana. Abeam of the foremast her boat booms remained rigged out on port and starboard, her boats riding to painters, while her crew wore a look as generally lounging as that of her passengers. Beverly Rodgers told me the reason: we had no pilot; the negro Waterman engaged for this excursion in the upper waters had failed of appearance, and when Charley was for looking up another, Kitty, Bohm, and Gazza had dissuaded him.

"Kitty," said Beverly, "told me she didn't care about the musty old forts and things, anyhow."

I looked at Kitty, and heard her tongue ticking away, like the little clock she was; she had her Bohm, she had her nautical costume and her Remsen cooler. These, with the lunch that would come in time, were enough for her.

"But it was such a good chance!" I exclaimed in disappointment

"Chance for what, old man?"

"To see everything--the forts, the islands--and it's beautiful, you know, all the way to the navy yard."

Beverly followed my glance to where the gay company was sitting among the cracked ice, and bottles, and cigar boxes, chattering volubly, with its back to the scenery. He gave his laisser-faire chuckle, and laid a hand on my shoulder. "Don't worry 'em with forts and islands, old boy! They know what they want. No living breed on earth knows better what it wants."

"Well, they don't get it."

"Ho, don't they?"

"The cold fear of ennui gnaws at their vitals this minute."

Shrill laughter from Kitty and Gazza served to refute my theory.

"Of course, very few know what's the matter with them," I added. "You seldom spot an organic disease at the start."

"Hm," said Beverly, lengthily. "You put a pin through some of 'em. Hortense hasn't got the disease, though."

"Ah, she spotted it! She's taking treatment. It's likely to help her--for a time."

He looked at me. "You know something."

I nodded. He looked at Hortense, who was now seated among the noisy group with quiet John beside her. She was talking to Bohm, she had no air of any special relation to John, but there was a lustre about her that spoke well for the treatment.

"Then it's coming off?" said Beverly.

"She has been too much for him," I answered.

Beverly misunderstood. "He doesn't look it."

"That's what I mean."

"But the fool can cut loose!"

"Oh, you and I have gone over all that! I've even gone over it with him."

Beverly looked at Hortense again. "And her fire-eater's fortune is about double what it would have been. I don't see how she's going to square herself with Charley."

"She'll wait till that's necessary. It isn't necessary to-day."

We had to drop our subject here, for the owner of the Hermana approached us with the amiable purpose, I found, of making himself civil for a while to me.

"I think you would have been interested to see the navy yard," I said to him.

"I have seen it," Charley replied, in his slightly foreign, careful voice. "It is not a navy yard. It is small politics and a big swamp. I was not interested."

"Dear me!" I cried. "But surely it's going to be very fine!"

"Another gold brick sold to Uncle Sam." Charley's words seemed always to drop out like little accurately measured coins from some minting machine. "They should not have changed from the old place if they wanted a harbor that could be used in war-time. Here they must always keep at least one dredge going out at the jetties. So the enemy blows up your dredge and you are bottled in, or bottled out. It is very simple for the enemy. And, for Kings Port, navy yards do not galvanize dead trade. It was a gold brick. You have not been on the Hermana before?"

He knew that I had not, but he wishes to show her to me; and I soon noted a difference as radical as it was diverting between this banker-yachtsman's speech when he talked of affairs on land and when he attempted to deal with nautical matters. The clear, dispassionate finality of his tone when phosphates, or railroads, or navy yards, or imperial loans were concerned, left him, and changed to something very like a recitation of trigonometry well memorized but not at all mastered; he could do that particular sum, but you mustn't stop him; and I concluded that I would rather have Charley for my captain during a panic in Wall Street than in a hurricane at sea. He, too, wore highly pronounced sea clothes of the ornamental kind; and though they fitted him physically, they hung baggily upon his unmarine spirit; giving him the air, as it were, of a broiled quail served on oyster shells. Beverly Rodgers, the consummate Beverly, was the only man of us whose clothes seemed to belong to him; he looked as if he could sail a boat.

While the cabin boy continued to rush among the guests with siphons, ice, and fresh refreshments, Charley became the Hermana's guidebook for me; and our interview gave me, I may say, entertainment unalloyed, although there lay all the while, beneath the entertainment, my sadness and concern about John. Charley was owner of the Hermana, there was no doubt of that; she had cost him (it was not long before he told me) fifty thousand dollars, and to run her it cost him a thousand a month. Yes, he was her owner, but there it stopped, no matter with how solemn a face he inspected each part of her, or spoke of her details; he was as much a passenger on her as myself; and this was as plain on the equally solemn faces of his crew, from the sailing-master down through the two quartermasters to the five deck-hands, as was the color of the Hermana's stack, which was, of course, yellow. She was a pole-mast, schooner-rigged steam yacht, Charley accurately told me, with clipper bow and spiked bowsprit.

"About a hundred tons?" I inquired.

"Yes. A hundred feet long, beam twenty feet, and she draws twelve feet," said Charley; and I thought I detected the mate listening to him.

He now called my attention to the flags, and I am certain that I saw the sailing-master hide his mouth with his hand. Some of the deck-hands seemed to gather delicately nearer to us.

"Sunday, of course," I said; and I pointed to the Jack flying from a staff at the bow.

But Charley did not wish me to tell him about the flags, he wished to tell me about the flags. "I am very strict about all this," he said, his gravity and nauticality increasing with every word. "At the fore truck flies our club burgee."

I went through my part, giving a solemn, silent, intelligent assent.

"That is my private signal at the main truck. It was designed by Miss Rieppe."

As I again intelligently nodded, I saw the boatswain move an elbow into the ribs of one of the quartermasters.

"On the staff at the taffrail I have the United States yacht ensign," Charley continued. "That's all," he said, looking about for more flags, and (to his disappointment, I think) finding no more. For he added: "But at twelve o'c--at eight bells, the crew's meal-flag will be in the port fore rigging. While we are at lunch, my meal-flag will be in the starboard main rigging."

"It should be there all day," I was tempted to remark to him, as my wandering eye fell on the cabin boy carrying something more on a plate to Kitty. But instead of this I said: "Well, she's a beautiful boat!"

Charley shook his head. "I'm going to get rid of her."

I was surprised. "Isn't she all right?" It seemed to me that the crew behind us were very attentive now.

"There is not enough refrigerator space," said Charley. One of the deck-hands whirled round instantly; but stolidity sat like adamant upon the faces of the others as Charley turned in their direction, and we continued our tour of the Hermana. Thus the little banker let me see his little soul, deep down; and there I saw that to pass for a real yachtsman--which he would never be able to do--was dearer to his pride than to bring off successfully some huge and delicate matter in the world's finance--which he could always do supremely well. "I'm just like that, too," I thought to myself; and we returned to the gay Kitty.

But Kitty, despite her gayety, had serious thoughts upon her mind. Charley's attentions to me had met all that politeness required, and as we went aft again, his sister caused certain movements and rearrangements to happen with chairs and people. I didn't know this at once, but I knew it when I found myself somehow sitting with her and John, and saw Hortense with Charley. Hortense looked over at Kitty with a s............