The Englishman and the captain consulted a moment.  Then the former spoke: 

“That will be satisfactory, sir, to Captain Cecchi and to me.  Write out your cables, if you please.  They shall be sent.  And I say, Mr. Bayne,—­I hope you drive that ambulance.  I’m not stationed here to be a partizan, but you’ve stood up to us like a man.”

An hour later as I finished my solitary dinner, the electric lights flickered and died, and the engines began their throb.  Under cover of the darkness we were slipping out of Gibraltar.  I leaned my arms on the table and scanned the remains of my feast by the light of my one sad candle, not thinking of what I saw, or of the various calls for help I had been dispatching, or of the sailor grimly mounting guard outside my door.  I was remembering a girl, a girl with ruddy hair and a wild-rose flush and great, gray, starry eyes, a girl that by all the rules of the game I should have handed over to those who represented the countries she was duping, a girl that I had found I had to shield when I came face to face with the issue.

CHAPTER IX

THE BLACK BUTTERFLIES

The Turin-Paris express—­the most direct, the Italians call it—­was too popular by half to suit the taste of morose beings who wished for solitude.  With great trouble and pains I had ferreted out a single vacant compartment; but as four o’clock sounded and the whistle blew for departure, a belated traveler joined me—­worse still, an acquaintance who could not be quite ignored.

The unwelcome intruder was Mr. John Van Blarcom, my late fellow-voyager, and he accepted the encounter with a better grace than I.

“Why, hello!” he greeted me cheerfully.  “Going through to France?  Glad to see you—­but you’re about the last man that I was looking for.  I got the idea somehow you were planning to stop a while in Rome.”

I returned his nod with a curtness I was at no pains to dissemble.  Then I reproached myself, for it was undeniable that on the Re d’Italia he had more than once stood my friend.  He had offered me a timely warning, which I had flouted; he had obligingly confirmed my statement in my grueling third degree.  Yet despite this, or because of it, I didn’t like him; nor did I like his patronizing, complacent manner, which seemed fairly to shriek at me, “I told you so!”

“Changed my plans,” I acknowledged with a lack of cordiality that failed to ruffle him.  He had hung up his overcoat and installed himself facing me, and was now making preparations for lighting a fat cigar.

“Well,” he commented, with a chuckle of raillery, after this operation, “the last time I saw you you were in a pretty tight corner, eh?  You can’t say it was my fault, either; I’d have put you wise if you’d listened.  But you weren’t taking any—­you knew better than I did—­and you strafed me, as the Dutchies say, to the kaiser’s taste.”