"What's the business, Raoul? I'd no idea you had any here. I thought ours was a pleasure trip, purely—or impurely."
"The business is strictly private," he replied, a savage note in his voice.
A month before, on leaving Paris, when Le Breton had asked Lucille Lemesurier, the actress, to accompany him on his yacht and spend a week or so in Grand Canary, it had been for pleasure solely.
But a few days ago a letter had reached him.
A letter to the effect that his enemy, now Sir George Barclay, had been appointed governor of Gambia. The Sultan Casim Ammeh was waiting in Grand Canary until certain that his man was en route for his new post.
CHAPTER IV
On the balcony of her bedroom Pansy Langham stood, slim and boyish-looking in a suit of silk pyjamas.
Beneath, the hotel grounds spread, running down to the shore. Beyond, the sea stretched, a silver mirror, away to the sparkling, frosty mist of the horizon. In the milky sky the moon soared, a molten globe, touching the drooping palms and making their quivering fronds look like silver fountains. A little line of waves lapped murmurously on the shore, in a running ridge of white fire. The stone wall edging the garden was turned into marble. Here and there across the beach the taller trees threw thick, ebony shadows.
On the whole expanse of silvered sea, only one mark showed like a black dot in the distance.