relish a very exhaustive search.”

“You bet you don’t,” his friend returned. “I shall probably be the only honest man aboard.”

“Mrs. Harrington may ask you to hold some small parcel till she’s been through the ordeal,” Denby reminded him. “If she does, Monty, you’ll be caught for a certainty.”

“Damn it all!” Monty cried petulantly, “why can’t you people do the right thing and declare what you bring in, just as I do?”

“What is your income?” Denby inquired. “Your father was always liberal with you.”

“You mean I have no temptation?” Monty answered. “I forgot that part of it. I don’t know what I’d do if there wasn’t always a convenient paying teller who passed me out all the currency I wanted.”

He looked at his friend curiously, wondering just what this act of smuggling meant to him. Perhaps Denby sensed this.

“You probably wondered why I wrung that invitation out of Mrs. Harrington instead of being honest and saying I, too, was going by the Cunard line. I can’t tell you now, Monty, old man, but I hope some day if I’m successful that I can. I tell you this much, though, that it seems so much to me that no little conventionalities are going to stand in my way.”

Monty, pondering on this later when he was in his hotel room, called to mind the rumor he had heard years ago that Steven’s father had died deeply in debt. It was for this reason that the boy was suddenly withdrawn from Groton. It might be that his struggles to make a living had driven him into regarding the laws against smuggling as arbitrary and inequitable just as Alice Harrington and dozens of other people he knew did. Denby, he argued, had paid good money for the pearls and they belonged to him absolutely; and if by his skill he could evade the payment of duty upon them and sell them at a profit, why shouldn’t he? Before slumber sealed his eyes, Montague Vaughan had decided that smuggling was as legitimate a sport as fly-fishing. That these views would shock his father he knew. But his father always prided himself upon a traditional conservatism.

CHAPTER FOUR

LESS than an hour before the Mauretania reached Quarantine, James Duncan, whose rank was that of Customs Inspector and present assignment the more important one of assistant to Daniel Taylor, a Deputy-Surveyor, threw away the stub of cigar and reached for the telephone.

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