“I’m going to be an honest woman,” she declared, “and smuggle no more. Mr. Denby is the miracle-worker. I shall probably have to borrow money to pay the duty, so be at hand, Monty.”
He looked across at Denby and sighed. His friend’s serene countenance and absence of nerves was always a source of wonderment to him. Hereafter, he swore, a life in consonance with his country’s laws. And if the first few days of the voyage had made him nervous, it was small comfort to think that the really risky part had yet to be gone through. In eliminating Alice Harrington as a fellow smuggler Monty saw extraordinary cunning. “Well,” he thought, “if anyone can carry it through it will be old Steve,” and rose obediently at Alice’s behest and brought back a wireless form on which he indited a message to the absent Michael.
Monty Vaughan had crossed the ocean often, and each time had been cheered to see in the distance the long flat coast-line of his native land. There had always been a sense of pleasurable excitement in the halt at Quarantine and the taking on board the harbor and other officials.
But this time they clambered aboard—the most vindictive set of mortals he had ever laid eyes on—and each one of them seemed to look at Monty as though he recognized a law breaker and a desperado. Incontinently he fled to the smoking-room and ran into the arms of Godfrey Hazen.
“Never mind, my boy,” said that genial broker, “you’ll soon be out of your misery. Brace up and have a drink. I know how you feel. I’ve felt like that myself.”
“Did you get caught?” Monty gasped.
“No,” he said, for he was a bachelor, “but I’ve had some mighty narrow squeaks and once I thought I was gone.”
He watched Monty gulp down his drink with unaccustomed rapidity. “That’s right,” he said commendingly. “Have another?”
“It would choke me,” the younger answered, and fled.
Hazen shook his head pityingly. He had never been as afflicted as the heir to his old friend Vaughan. Poets might understand love and its symptoms but such manifestations were beyond him.