"Do I understand I am to consider myself your prisoner?"
"Oh, dear, no!" said Captain Monk, inexpressibly pained by such crudity. "But I do wish you'd consider favourably an invitation to be our honoured guest on the voyage to New York. You won't? It would be so agreeable of you."
"Sorry I must decline. A prior engagement...."
"But you see, Lanyard," Phinuit urged earnestly, "we've taken no end of a fancy to you. We like you, really, for yourself alone. And with that feeling the outgrowth of our very abbreviated acquaintance--think what a friendship might come of a real opportunity to get to know one another well."
"Some other time, messieurs...."
"But please!" Phinuit persisted--"just think for one moment--and do forget that pistol I know you've got in a handy pocket. We're all unarmed here, Mademoiselle Delorme, the skipper and I. We can't stop your going, if you insist, and we know too much to try. But there are those aboard who might. Jules, for instance: if he saw you making a getaway and knew it might mean a term in a French prison for him.... And if I do say it as shouldn't of my kid brother, Jules is a dead shot. Then there are others. There'd surely be a scrimmage on the decks; and how could we explain that to the police, who, I am able to assure you from personal observation, are within hail? Why, that you had been caught trying to stow away with your loot, which you dropped in making your escape. D'ye see how bad it would look for you?"
To this there was no immediate response. Sitting with bowed head and sombre eyes, Lanyard thought the matter over a little, indifferent to the looks of triumph being exchanged above his head.
"Obviously, it would seem, you have not gone to all this trouble--lured me aboard this yacht--merely to amuse yourselves at my expense and then knock me on the head."
"Absurd!" Liane declared indignantly. "As if I would permit such a thing, who owe you so much!"
"Or look at it this way, monsieur," Monk put in with a courtly gesture: "When one has an adversary whom one respects, one wisely prefers to have him where one can watch him."