Then when Mr. Tiler’s weedy horse began to show signs of distress, for my sturdy pair had outpaced him sorely, I relented and reentered the town, meaning to make a long halt at the office of Messrs. Cook and Son, the universal friends of all travellers far and near.  I had long had an idea in my mind that the most promising, if not the only effective method of ending our trouble would be to put the seas between us and the myrmidons of the Courts.  I had always hoped to escape to some far-off country where the King’s writ does not run, where we could settle down under genial skies, amid pleasant surroundings, at a distance from the worries and miseries of life.

Now, with the enemy close at hand, and the real treasure in my foolish sister’s care, I could not expect to evade them, but I might surely beguile and lead them astray.  This was the plan I had been revolving in my mind, and which took me to the tourist offices.  The object I had in view was to get a list of steamers leaving the port of Marseilles within the next two or three days, and their destination.  As everybody knows, there is a constant moving of shipping East, West, and South, and it ought not to be difficult to pick out something to suit me.

The obliging clerk at the counter gave me abundant, almost unending, information.

“To the East?  Why, surely, there are several opportunities.  The P. and O. has half a dozen steamers for the East, pointing first for Port Said and Suez Canal, and bound to India, Ceylon, China, and the Antipodes; the same line for Gibraltar and the West.  The Messageries Maritime, for all Mediterranean ports, the General Navigation of Italy for Genoa and Naples, the Transatlantique for various Algerian ports, Tunis, Bone, Philippeville, and Algiers, other companies serving the coast of Morocco and especially Tangier.”

Truly an embarrassing choice!  I took a note of all that suited, and promised to return after I had made a round of the shipping offices,—­another jaunt for Tiler, and a pretty plain indication of what was in my mind.

After full inquiry I decided in favour of Tripoli, and for several reasons.  A steamer offered in a couple of days, Sunday, just when I wanted it, although it was by no means my intention to go to Tripoli myself.  That it was somewhat out of the way, neither easy to reach nor to leave, as the steamers came and went rarely, served my purpose well.  If I could only inveigle my tormentors into the trap, they might be caught there longer than they liked.

Accordingly, I secured a good cabin on board the S.S. Oasis of the Transatlantique, leaving Marseilles for Tripoli at 8 A.M. the following Sunday, and paid the necessary deposit on the passage ticket.

It was a satisfaction to me to see my “shadow’s” fiacre draw up at the door soon after I left, and Mr. Ludovic Tiler enter the office.  I made no doubt he would contrive, very cleverly as he thought, to find out exactly what I had been doing with regard to the Oasis.