The breeze had got under the peak of her yachting cap, and sent it flying aft. The pin dislocated the arrangement of her hair, and the next moment she was standing with the loosened shining coils streaming out behind her, unravelling into a shower of golden glory. Adelaide, with the instinct of a Frenchwoman, had drawn her shawl tight round her head. Hardress looked round at the moment, and, if his heart had ever wavered, in that moment the old allegiance was confirmed. There was no more comparison between the tall, deep-chested American girl, with her cheeks glowing, her eyes shining in the sheer joy of physical life, and her long gold-brown hair streaming away behind her, and the slight, shrinking figure of the daughter of the Bourbons, cowering behind the canvas of the bridge and gripping the shawl that covered her head, than there might have been between a sea-nymph of the old Grecian legends and a fine lady of to-day caught in an unexpected gust of wind.
Miss Chrysie looked natural and magnificent, breasting the gale and breathing it in as though she loved it. Adelaide de Condé, the exotic of the drawing-room, cowered before it, and looked pinched, and shivered. Lady Olive, with one hand on the top of her cap and the other holding the wrap she had thrown round her shoulders, gasped for a moment, and said:
"Yes, Chrysie; this is glorious. Twenty knots!—that's about twenty-four miles an hour, isn't it, a little bit faster than a South-Eastern express train?"
"I hope so," laughed Hardress; "if it wasn't we should be some time in getting to Halifax. And now, I suppose, you've got some coffee ready for us down in the saloon?"
"Oh yes, it will be quite ready now," said Lady Olive. "Mr Vandel and papa have started their chess already; Madame de Bourbon is still making lace with those wonderful eyes and fingers of hers; and so, if you want to exchange the storm for the calm, come along."
A little after eleven that night, when the Nadine, thrilling in every plate and plank, was tearing through the smooth water of the Atlantic at nearly twenty-one knots an hour, a council of three was being held in the smoking-room on deck. The doors and windows were closed, and a quarter-master was patrolling the deck on each side. Below in the saloon, Miss Chrysie, with a dainty little revolver in the pocket of her yachting skirt, was playing poker for beans with Madame de Bourbon, Lady Olive, and the marquise. In short, as Miss Chrysie herself would have expressed it, things were rapidly coming to a head on board the Nadine.
"It seems to me," said the president, "that, all things considered—thank you, viscount, I think I will take just one more peg—we have just got to take every possible precaution. I don't say that I am suspecting or accusing anybody; but, considering that we've got about the biggest thing on earth right here aboard this yacht, I don't think we should calculate on taking any risks. Take that telegram to start with. There can't be any doubt about that; and it doesn't matter whether the marquise or Ma'm'selle Felice sent it, there it is. Get it down to plain figures. This boat does twenty knots, and she started fifteen hours before her time. A telegram goes from Southampton to Cherbourg, as Chrysie's duplicate showed, clearly telling Count Valdemar, on the Vlodoya at Cherbourg, where he had no business to be, according to his programme, that we were sailing in the afternoon instead of the next morning, and it ended by telling him to make haste. Now, what does haste mean? We steam twenty knots, and the Vlodoya, we know, steams about sixteen. She started from Cherbourg, and we started from Southampton. The French and Russian Polar expeditions are perhaps under weigh now, and, from what we know, I reckon that they have a fairly good idea of what we're going across the Atlantic for. Now, how's a sixteen-knot boat going to catch a twenty-knot yacht anywhere between Southampton and Halifax?"
"And why should Count Valdemar receive that telegram at Cherbourg, as I suppose he did," said Lord Orrel, "instead of going on to the Baltic, when he said he was in such a hurry to get to Petersburg?"
"That, I think," said Hardress, "is the most suspicious fact in the whole business. Of course, I don't like to suspect our late or our present guests, but I must confess that I feel there's something wrong. What it is I can't exactly say; but still I do feel that everything is not as it ought to be."
"And that," said the president, "I think I can explain in a few words—not my own ideas altogether, because Chrysie has given me a good many points. You know, gentlemen, there are some things that a woman's eyes can see through a lot farther than a man's can, and Chrysie doesn't always keep her eyes down."