"Thank you."
As Whitney returned the box he noticed that Andrew was watching them. Then he glanced quickly at Elsie, but she was quietly knitting, with her eyes on the stitches.
A few minutes afterward a servant brought in the afternoon edition of a Glasgow newspaper. Staffer glanced at the front page and then sat down near one of the lamps. There was a certain deliberation in his movements that Whitney noticed, though he admitted that he might not have done so had not the matchbox incident roused him to suspicious vigilance. He thought Staffer was waiting for something, and in a moment or two Williamson left Dick and turned toward him.
Then Staffer folded back the newspaper.
"The A. & P. liner Centaur has gone down in the North Channel," he announced calmly.
Whitney started, Dick abruptly put down his cue, and Andrew's face grew hard.
"Do you mean that she was blown up?" Elsie asked with a note of horror in her voice.
"It looks so; but there's not much news yet."
"The captain of the Clyde coaster Gannet reports that when he was off the Skerries near dark one of the big A. & P. liners passed him at some distance to the north. It was blowing fresh, and hazy, but when the vessel was almost out of sight he noticed a dense cloud of smoke. He ran to the box on the bridge-rail, where he kept his glasses, but when he got them out the liner had disappeared. He steered for the spot where he had last seen her, but it was dark when he reached it, and after steaming about for some time, and seeing nothing but a quantity of wreckage, he made for Rathlin and megaphoned the lighthouse-keepers before proceeding. An unconfirmed report from Larne states that a fishing craft passed a steamer's lifeboat, but lost her in the dark. The Centaur, a large and nearly new steamer, left Montreal with wheat and a number of passengers eight days ago."