you may take it for certain he’d made enemies over there, and these Hindus are the devil (saving your presence again, ma’am) for nursing a grudge.  ’Keep a stone in your pocket seven years:  turn it, keep it for another seven; ’twill be ready at hand for your enemy’—­that’s their way.  But, to begin with, an old jogi is nothing strange to meet on a ship before she clears.  These beggars in the East will creep in anywhere.  And, next, you’ll hardly maintain that an old beggarman (’seventy years old if a day,’ said Orchard) was going to take an active man like Mr. Annesley and cram him bodily through a cabin window?  ’Tis out of nature.  And yet when we broke into his cabin, twenty-four hours later, there was not a trace of him:  only his boxes neatly packed, his watch hanging to the beam and just running down, a handful of gold and silver tossed on to the bunk—­just as he might have emptied it from his pockets—­nothing else, and the whole cabin neat as a pin.”

“But,” objected Mr. Matthew Wesley, “if this jogi—­or whatever you call him—­had entered the cabin for no good, he would hardly have missed the money lying on the bunk.”

“Sir, you must not judge these eastern mendicants by your London beggars.  They are not thieves, nor avaricious, but religious men practising self-denial, who collect alms merely to support life, and believe that money so bestowed blesses the giver.”

“A singularly perverted race!” was the apothecary’s comment.

Captain Bewes turned towards Mr. Samuel, who next spoke from the penumbra at the far end of the table.  “I believe, Captain,” said he, “that these mendicants are as a rule the most harmless of men?”

“Wouldn’t hurt a fly, sir.  I have known some whose charity extended to the vermin on their own bodies.”

Mrs. Wesley sat tapping the mahogany gently with her finger-tips.  “To my thinking, the key of this mystery, if there be one, lies at Surat.  My brother had powerful enemies:  his letters make that clear.  We must inquire into them—­their numbers and the particular grudge they bore him—­and also into the state of his mind.  He was not the sort of person to be kidnapped in open day.”

—­“By a Thames waterman, for instance, madam?” said Captain Bewes, jocularly, but instantly changed his tone.  “You suggest that he may have disappeared on his own account?  To avoid his enemies, you mean?”

“As to his motives, sir, I say nothing:  but it certainly looks to me as if he had planned to give you the slip.”

“Tut-tut!” exclaimed Matthew.  “And left his money behind?  Not likely!”

“We have still his boxes to search—­”

“Under power of attorney,” Sam suggested.  “We must see about getting it to-morrow.”

“Well, madam”—­Captain Bewes knocked out his pipe, drained his glass, and rose—­“the boxes shall be delivered up as soon as you bring me authority:  and I trust, for my own sake as well as yours, the contents will clear up this mystery for us.  I shall be tied to my ship for the next three days, possibly for another week—­”