The sailor’s grim face appeared a moment later, emerging like the face of a hermit-crab from its shell.  The frown slowly faded, and the deep, unwashed wrinkles took a kindlier curve.

“It’s you, Mr. Cartoner,” he said.  “Glad to see you.”

“I was passing in a steamer,” answered Cartoner, quietly, “and recognized the Minnie.”

“I take it friendly of you, Mr. Cartoner, remembering the rum time you and me had together.  Come below.  I’ve got a drop of wine somewhere stowed away in a locker.”

VI

THE VULTURES

“I suppose,” Miss Mangles was saying—­“I suppose, Joseph, that Lady Orlay has been interested in the work without our knowing it?”

“It is possible, Jooly—­it is possible,” replied Mr. Joseph P. Mangles, looking with a small, bright, speculative eye out of the window of his private sitting-room in a hotel in Northumberland Avenue.

Miss Mangles was standing behind him, and held in her hand an invitation-card notifying that Lady Orlay would be at home that same evening from nine o’clock till midnight.

“This invitation,” said the recipient, “accompanied as it is by a friendly note explaining that the shortness of the invitation lies in the fact that we only arrived the day before yesterday, seems to point to it, Joseph.  It seems to indicate that England is prepared to give me a welcome.”

“On the face of it, Jooly, it would seem—­just that.”

Mr. Mangles continued to gaze with a speculative eye into Northumberland Avenue.  If, as Cartoner had suggested, the profession of which Mr. Joseph P. Mangles was a tardy ornament, needed above all things a capacity for leaving things unsaid, the American diplomatist was not ignorant in his art.  For he did not inform his sister that the invitation to which she attached so flattering a national importance owed its origin to an accidental encounter between himself and Lord Orlay—­a friend of his early senatorial days—­in Pall Mall the day before.

Miss Mangles stood with the card in her hand and reflected.  No woman and few men would need to be told, moreover, the subject of her thoughts.  Of what, indeed, does every woman think the moment she receives an invitation?

“Jooly,” Mr. Mangles had been heard to say behind that lady’s back—­“Jooly is an impressive dresser when she tries.”

But the truth is that Jooly did not always try.  She had not tried this morning, but stood in the conventional hotel room dressed in a black cloth garment which had pleats down the front and back and a belt like a Norfolk jacket.  Miss Mangles was large and square-shouldered.  She was a rhomboid, in fact, and had that depressing square-and-flat waist which so often figures on the platform in a great cause.  Her hair was black and shiny and straight; it was drawn back from her rounded temples by hydraulic pressure.