him always. Even the man with the high-pitched voice of a hypochondriac—presumably, from the manner of his address, her father—had hinted that her suffering had already passed the bounds set for one who, to serve her own ends, had gone through that amazing ceremony.

[Pg 60]

[Pg 60]

Maseden did not actually marshal his thoughts thus clearly. If compelled to bend his wits to the task, he might have spoken or written in such wise. But an active brain has its own haphazard methods of weighing a new and distracting problem; it will ask and answer a dozen startling questions simultaneously.

In the midst of Maseden’s strange and formless imaginings the ship’s course was changed a couple of points to the southward, and the Southern Cross was shut out of sight by the forecastle head. Then, and not until then, did the coincidence of the vessel’s name with that of the constellation occur to his bemused wits.

He laughed cheerfully.

“By gad!” he said, “all the signs of the zodiac must have clustered about my horoscope on this 15th of January. When I get ashore I must find an astrologer and ask him to expound.”

The sound of his own voice brought a belated warning to Maseden of the folly he had committed in speaking aloud.

There was no other occupant of the fore deck at the moment. A look-out man in the bows could not possibly have overheard, because of the whistling of the breeze created by the ship’s momentum and the plash of the curved waves set up by the cut-water, and it [Pg 61]was highly improbable that words uttered in a conversational tone would have reached the bridge.

[Pg 61]

But behind him rose the three decks of the superstructure, and there might be eavesdroppers on the promenade deck or in one of the two dark gangways running aft.

He glanced over his shoulder to right and left. Apparently he had escaped this time. No matter what developments took place in the near future, he was by no means anxious as yet to reveal his nationality. Each hour brought home, more and more forcibly, the misfortune of the chance which left him no alternative but the shooting of Suarez that morning.

The act was absolutely essential to his own safety, but it put him clearly out of court. At any rate, the 

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