"There is a gorgeous hotel awaiting them at the head of the harbour, where they dress and dine, and then out they go, down the avenues of rustling date-palms (which bear electric lamps amongst their ochre fruit-clusters), and so on, to the most sumptuous building in the world, the new Cabreran casino.

"It differs hugely from the old temple of chance on the edge of the Continent—that enfer sur terre set amid a paradis. There is no ornate concert-room here, or theatre or opera house. There is not even a salon for gossip and smoke and exercise. The whole is one enormous salle de jeu, and the clink of gold against yellow gold is the only instrumental music. The cartwheel five-franc piece is nowhere permissible now, and at the rouge et noir tables hundred-franc notes are the smallest stake. There is a change in everything except in the croupiers and the chefs, and the actual tables and machinery over which they preside. Even the atmosphere is new. The old dry heat is no more. In its place is a moist warmth, heavy with the scent of heliotrope and tuba roses. It seems as if one of the scent factories at Hyères had staved its vats somewhere close at hand. Change everywhere. Mesdemoiselles les cocottes——But I weary m'sieu' with my twaddle. 'Rien ne va plus.' The farce is over.

"Regard that brown promontory yonder, the easternmost horn of Palma Bay. With permission take my lunette. So; now you cannot fail to see. A ship of the Romans laden with pottery struck there in time past, filled, and went down in deep water. The fishermen often bring up in their nets unbroken pieces from her cargo, crocks and pipkins identical in shape and texture with those the islanders use to-day. Ah, m'sieu', but they are ignorant, these Mallorcans, and happy in their ignorance. Food is so easily gained that none need starve; they have the best climate imaginable, free from the sirocco which plagues Algeria, and from the mistral which kills one on the Riviera; they are too indolent to meddle with politics; they live in a lotus-land of beauty and ease. We should despise them, monsieur, but I fear many of us will envy their lot."

The Antiguo Mahones was threading her way through a fleet of small fishing-boats, as I could tell by the reduced speed, the hooting of the siren, and the constant and prolonged rattle of the steering rods. Soon she would bring up to the quay in Palma harbour. Why should I not get ashore there and work out the hard problem that was engaging me?

So far I had made no scheme of ultimate route. The meeting at the Mahon hotel with that cheery chevalier d'industrie Haigh, and the knowledge that that more robust brigand, his blustering, heavy-fisted partner Cospatric, was close at hand, had given me little leisure to plan far ahead. All my time was occupied in thinking how to fool the one and keep out of sight of the other till I could make escape from their immediate vicinage.

But having once cleared from the island, it seemed to me that all probable danger of our future meeting was passed; at any rate, Mallorca would be the most unlikely spot to run foul of them in. So when the commercial traveller had turned away to look after his own affairs again, I got hold of Sadi, and told him to pull our traps together and pay up what we owed.

Sadi turned and set about fulfilling the order without a question. That is the best of Sadi. He never wants to know the why or wherefore of anything. Within limits he is the perfection of a servant for a man such as me.

I had trusted Sadi with many things, and so far he had never failed me. I felt sure that he liked me, which was more than I would have said for any other member of the human race. But all the same, if he had seen it worth his while to rob or betray, I'd a pretty strong notion that blood instinct would prove too strong, and he'd do it. You see, Sadi's mother was half Arab, half Portuguese; his father was all Portuguese—jail-bird Portuguese; his youth had been spent in Marquez, which is on Delagoa Bay; and these things do not breed immaculate honesty calculated to stand every strain.

I may have wronged Sadi. As I say, he never failed me. But I felt that there might reasonably be a limit to his faithfulness, and to let him have the solving of that inscription which I carried about my person locked in a fleckless photographic plate might very well have outstepped that limit. It would have been a heavy test on an archbishop's honesty.

So I did not intend to employ Sadi about this matter except as a last resort. I wished to let this, the most valuable secret the world contained, be known to no one except myself, if it could be so contrived. I desired to get it stored within my brain alone, and then to destroy the only other trace of it that was existent.