“You came aft on the port side, didn’t you?” Lanyard enquired of the second mate.

Collison nodded.  “Running,” he said—­“couldn’t imagine what was up.”

“It is easy not to see what one is not looking for,” Lanyard mused, staring forward along the starboard side.  “If a man had dropped flat and squirmed along until in the shelter of the engine-room ventilators, he could have run forward—­bending low, you know—­without your seeing him.”

“But you were standing here, to starboard!”

“I tell you, that match was blinding me,” Lanyard affirmed irritably.  “Besides, I wasn’t looking—­except at my sister—­wondering what was the matter.”

Collison started.  “Excuse me,” he said, reminded—­“if mademoiselle’s all right, I ought to get back to the bridge.”

“Take me below,” Liane begged.  “I must speak with Captain Monk.”

Monk and Phinuit were taking their ease plus nightcaps in the captain’s sitting-room.  A knock brought a prompt invitation to “Come in!” Lanyard thrust the door open and curtly addressed Monk:  “Mademoiselle Delorme wishes to see you.”  The eloquent eyebrows indicated surprise and resignation, and Monk got up and inserted himself into his white linen tunic.  Phinuit, more sensitive to the accent of something amiss, hurried out in unceremonious shirt sleeves.  “What’s up?” he demanded, looking from Lanyard’s grave face to Liane’s face of pallor and distress.  Lanyard informed him in a few words.

“Impossible!” Phinuit commented.

“Nonsense,” Monk added, speaking directly to Liane.  “You imagined it all.”

She had recovered much of her composure, enough to enable her to shrug her disdain of such stupidity.

“I tell you only what my two eyes saw.”

“To be sure,” Monk agreed with a specious air of being wide open to conviction.  “What became of him, then?”

“You ask me that, knowing that in stress of terror I fainted!”

The eyebrows achieved an effect of studied weariness.  “And you saw nobody, monsieur?  And Collison didn’t, either?”

Lanyard shook his head to each question.  “Still, it is possible——.”

Monk cut him short impatiently.  “All gammon—­all in her eye!  No man bigger than a cockroach could have smuggled himself aboard this yacht without my being told.  I know my ship, I know my men, I know what I’m talking about.”

“Presently,” Liane prophesied darkly, “you may be talking about nothing.”

At a loss, Monk muttered:  “Don’t get you....”

“When you find yourself, some fine morning, with your throat cut in your sleep, like poor de Lorgnes—­or garroted, as I might have been.”

“I’m not going to lose any sleep.....”  Monk began.

“Lose none before you have the vessel searched,” Liane pleaded, with a change of tone.  “You know, messieurs, I am not a woman given to hallucinations.  I saw ...  And I tell you, while that assassin is at liberty aboard this yacht, not one of our lives is worth a sou—­no, not one!”