But, after all, he was going to Hunston, whether he liked it or not, simply because Uncle Elbert had asked him. The lonely old gentleman, he knew, loved him like a son: he had turned straight to him in his hour of need. This had touched the young man, and had finally made up his mind for him. Moreover Mary, a spoiled little piece who was suffered to set her smug childish will against the combined wills of both her parents, aroused his keenest antipathy. To put her in her place, to teach her that children must obey their parents in the Lord, was a duty to society, to the State. What Uncle Elbert wanted with such a child, he could not conceive; but since he did want her, have her he should. Tilting back his office chair and running his hand through his hair, Varney longed to spank her.
This thought came to him, definitely and for about the seventh time, at half-past one o'clock on the third day, Monday. At the same moment, his telephone-bell rang sharply. It was the sailing-master to say that his good spouse had come aboard and that everything on the Cypriani was in readiness for the start.
"I'll be on board inside of an hour," said Varney.
He telephoned to Uncle Elbert, telephoned to Peter, and locked up his desk. To his office he casually gave out that pressing business matters were calling him out of town for a day or two.
The two young men had been as furtive as possible about their proposed journey. They had not met since the night Varney had dangled the hope of jail and disgrace into Peter's lightening face, and so, or otherwise, cajoled him into going along. Both of them had kept carefully away from the Cypriani. Now they proceeded to her by different routes, and reached her at different times, Peter first. Their luggage had gone aboard before them, and there was no longer a thing to wait for. At three o'clock, on Varney's signal, the ship's bell sounded, her whistle shrieked, and she slid off through the waters of the bay.
About the start there was nothing in the least dramatic: they had merely begun moving through the water and that was all. The Cypriani, for all her odd errand, was merely one of a thousand boats which indifferently crossed each other's wakes in one of the most crowded harbors in the world.
"For all the lime-light we draw," observed Maginnis, drinking in the freshening breeze, "we might be running up to Harlem to address the fortnightly meeting of a Girls' Friendly Society."
Varney said: "Give us a chance, will you?"