"I have to eat double to make up for the blood I lost last night," Jerry said, with a grin. "I find there's nothing for the appetite like a regular brush with the police. I've found it so before, when I was in college."
After breakfast the two went on deck, and seated under the awning, with the beautiful bay before them and a soft air to bring a delicious coolness, they talked over the adventure of the previous night. Then from this they branched off to more general matters. Mr. Wrenmarsh was a man of wide experience and of good observation, and was well informed on almost every topic the talk touched upon. His tricks and eccentricities had been for the time being laid aside, or showed only as a flavor of personality piquant and attractive. Jerry found himself soothed and entertained, although, remembering his previous experience with the collector, he was not without a feeling that Wrenmarsh had a propensity to use speech as a squid does his ink, to conceal his course, and so wondered what the collector had still to gain. Wrenmarsh suddenly took to intricate and unintelligible sentences without warning and equally without apparent excuse, when Jerry brought him back to earth with a question what he intended to do next.
"Do?" exclaimed Wrenmarsh, as if shocked and astonished by such an inquiry. "Of course I shan't think of setting foot on shore again till I get to England."
Jerry hardly suppressed an instinctive whistle, and for a brief instant he had nothing to say; but after all he was not without a shrewdness of his own. He was still chagrined to remember that the archæologist had played upon him once for his own purposes, and he had at least learned that in dealing with this man it was necessary to be cautious.
"To England?" he repeated in a voice so casual as to rouse Wrenmarsh and to tickle himself inwardly. "How do you go?"
"Go?" once more echoed the other. "With you, of course."
"Oh, are we going to England?" Jerry asked more carelessly than before.
"Surely you are," Wrenmarsh retorted with some sharpness.
"Are we really?" was Jerry's comment. A refrain from a song in a Pudding play popped into his head, and he hummed it in derision hardly disguised,—
"You surprise me!"