Had the Italian Admiral been able to send a torpedo-boat or two after the fugitives they would no doubt soon have been overhauled, yet circumstances had prevented this and the Lola had consequently escaped.

For purposes of their own the police kept the affair out of the papers, and when Frank Hutcheson stepped out of the sleeping-car from Paris on to the platform at Pisa a few nights afterwards, I related to him the extraordinary story.

“The scoundrels wanted these, that’s evident,” he responded, holding up the small, strong, leather hand-bag he was carrying, and which contained his jealously-guarded ciphers.  “By Jove!” he laughed, “how disappointed they must have been!”

“It may be so,” I said, as we entered the midnight train for Leghorn.  “But my own theory is that they were searching for some paper or other that you possess.”

“What can my papers concern them?” exclaimed the jovial, round-faced Consul, a man whose courtesy is known to every skipper trading up and down the Mediterranean, and who is perhaps one of the most cultured and popular men in the British Consular Service.  “I don’t keep bank notes in that safe, you know.  We fellows in the Service don’t roll in gold as our public at home appears to think.”

“No.  But you may have something in there which might be of value to them.  You’re often the keeper of valuable documents belonging to Englishmen abroad, you know.”

“Certainly.  But there’s nothing in there just now except, perhaps, the registers of births, marriages and deaths of British subjects, and the papers concerning a Board of Trade inquiry.  No, my dear Gordon, depend upon it that the yacht running ashore was all a blind.  They did it so as to be able to get the run of the Consulate, secure the ciphers, and sail merrily away with them.  It seems to me, however, that they gave you a jolly good dinner and got nothing in return.”

“They might very easily have carried me off too,” I declared.

“Perhaps it would have been better if they had.  You’d at least have had the satisfaction of knowing what their little game really was!”

“But the man and the woman who left the yacht an hour before she sailed, and who slipped away into the country somewhere!  I wonder who they were?  Hornby distinctly told me that he and Chater were alone, and yet there was evidently a lady and a gentleman on board.  I guessed there was a woman there, from the way the boudoir and ladies’ saloon were arranged, and certainly no man’s hand decorated a dinner table as that was decorated.”

“Yes.  That’s decidedly funny,” remarked the Consul thoughtfully.  “They went to Colle Salvetti, you say?  They changed there, of course.  Expresses call there, one going north and the other south, within a quarter of an hour after the train arrives from Leghorn.  They showed a lot of ingenuity, otherwise they’d have gone direct to Pisa.”

“Ingenuity!  I should think so!  The whole affair was most cleverly planned.  Hornby would have deceived even you, my dear old chap.  He had the air of the perfect gentleman, and a glance over the yacht convinced me that he was a wealthy man traveling for pleasure.”