“Didn’t seem to be any use waiting for that,” her friend retorted briskly.  “Hilda and I are dying for a cocktail, Mr. Romilly.”

He led them with an unwillingness of which they seemed frankly unaware, towards the lounge.  They drank two cocktails and found themselves unfortunately devoid of cigarettes, a misfortune which it became his privilege to remedy.  They were very friendly young ladies, if a little slangy, invited him around to their staterooms, and offered to show him the runs around New York.  Philip escaped after about an hour and made his way to where Elizabeth was reclining in her deck chair.

“That fellow Romilly,” he declared irritably, “the other one, I mean, seems to have had the vilest tastes.  If I am to be landed with any more of his ridiculous indiscretions, I think I shall have to go overboard.  There was an enterprising gentleman named Gayes in Liverpool, who nearly drove me crazy, then there’s this Mr. Lawton who wants to talk about lasts, and finally it seems that I dined at the Trocadero and spent the evening at the Empire and Murray’s with the two very obvious-looking young ladies who accosted me just now.  I am beginning to believe that Douglas’ life was not above suspicion.”

She smiled at him tolerantly.  An unopened book lay by her side.  She seemed to have been spending the last quarter of an hour in thought.

“I am rather relieved to hear,” she confessed, “that those two young people are a heritage from the other Mr. Romilly.  No, don’t sit down,” she went on.  “I want you to do something for me.  Go into the library, and on the left-hand side as you enter you will see all the wireless news.  Read the bottom item and then come back to me.”

He turned slowly away.  All his new-found buoyancy of spirits had suddenly left him.  He cursed the imagination which lifted his feet from the white decks and dragged his eyes from the sparkling blue sea to the rain-soaked, smut-blackened fields riven by that long thread of bleak, turgid water.  The horrors of a murderous passion beat upon his brain.  He saw himself hastening, grim and blind, on his devil-sped mission.  Then the haze faded from before his eyes.  Somehow or other he accomplished his errand.  He was in the library, standing in front of those many sheets of typewritten messages, passing them all over, heedless of what their message might be, until he came to the last and most insignificant.  Four lines, almost overlapped by another sheet—­

  Strange disappearance of A London art teacher

  Suicide feared