While the captain was looking with Katrine down on the Merle, as the yacht lay quietly at anchor in the harbor, a notable conversation was taking place on board. At no very early hour Tab had risen, tubbed with difficulty, and, with some aid, got into his clothes. His left arm was stiff and very sore, but beyond that he felt no discomfort. His magnificent physique, improved by the hardy life he had been leading, saved him from any consequences more serious; so that the archÆologist, who was in capital spirits, rallied him on the prodigious appetite he displayed at breakfast.

"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!"

"Will you—er—say that again?" asked the collector most courteously.

"Oh, quite unnecessary," Tab returned, not to be trapped into an apology. "It was only a bit of a song."

He was filled with a pleasant feeling that he was bothering the collector, astute as that person was, and he determined, as the circumstances certainly were in his favor, to hold his own with him this time at least.

"I don't think you have a very clear view of the case," Wrenmarsh said, after a moment of silent musing with contracted brow. "If you had, you'd see that it isn't possible for me to go ashore now, after that beastly business of last night. I assure you, I'm awfully sorry for that mess. There's another thing,—I couldn't get those boxes ashore from the yacht without their being examined, and then there'd be the devil of a row."

"That must have occurred to you before you left PÆstum," Jerry remarked with coolness.

Mr. Wrenmarsh did not move a muscle.

"So it did," he said blandly; "but of course I knew it must have been evident to you also."

Jerry laughed in spite of himself at the cool impudence of this.

"I confess that it wasn't," he responded.

"Even if it wasn't," the other went on, as smoothly as ever, "I never for an instant supposed that when once you'd started out to help me, you'd funk. That is a contingency, I confess, never occurred to my mind. I thought you were made of different stuff. You were clear game last night."

Jerry looked at his guest and burst into deep-throated laughter.

"Well, for clean cheek!" he cried. "Do you think I'm going to tote you about in a yacht I don't own for the rest of my life?"

"Would you like to?" asked the collector, with a fresh aspect of interest. "Because in the Ægean Sea I've a"—

"Whatever it is, please keep it to yourself, or you'll insist that I promised to help you with it," interrupted Tab grimly. "As for going to England in the present case, that's quite out of the question. What are you going to do? If you stay on board, you'll land in Boston."

Mr. Wrenmarsh's face took on for an instant a look distinctly ugly. It suddenly occurred to Taberman that the collector was in rather an evil plight,—worse, indeed, than that from which the Merle had rescued him.

"Surely you're not serious?" Wrenmarsh asked slowly.

"I think I am," Jerry responded pleasantly. "What are you going to do?"

"Damn!" the other broke out explosively, lying back in his chair and running his fingers through his gray-sprinkled locks.

Jerry was too soft-hearted not to be touched by the other's perplexity, but an involuntary movement of sympathy which he made happened to give him a painful twinge in the arm, and he hardened his heart. There was a silence of some minutes, during which he tried to make out from the face of his companion what thoughts were passing behind that mask. Suddenly the cloud lifted from the face of Wrenmarsh, and he flashed a bright glance on Jerry.

"Bless me," he cried gayly. "I might have thought! Plutus—Mammon—filthy lucre! But how extraordinary in an American—not to ask for it, you know! What'll you take for it?"

"For what?" responded Tab, not catching his drift.

He had a dreadful feeling that by becoming incomprehensible, the other might be getting the better of him.

"What's to pay for a passage of myself and my boxes to—let us say Plymouth?"

Indignation for the instant flared up in Jerry.

"This is not a passenger ship," he responded brusquely.

"Oh, of course not, my dear fellow; but as every man has his price, I suppose a yacht has too."

Common-sense and indignation worked together now to keep Taberman from an angry retort. It flashed upon him that here was a chance, one in a thousand, to pay off the hands of the Merle without troubling the President; it was a chance, too, to score off this cheeky archÆologist. Taberman had already noted that Wrenmarsh was a penurious soul who hated to part with money, and he felt something of the godly joy of the departing Israelites when Moses announced the project for the spoiling of the Egyptians. England was not such an impossible distance off. They might take the Great Circle track home. Surely if Jack—

"Don't you see my position, Mr. Wrenmarsh?" he asked. "I haven't the power to dispose of the Merle. I'm simply in charge of her while the captain's ashore, don't you see? Still"—

He paused dramatically.

"Well?" ejaculated Wrenmarsh, apparently keeping his gaze fixed in the closest interest on the red sails of a big felucca that was standing in toward the Mole.

"Well, I think I might be right in making a sort of conditional—a purely conditional"—he repeated the word for caution, wondering if he ought to make it any stronger—"arrangement. It wouldn't be valid without the sanction of the captain. You see that, of course."

"Well?" repeated the other.

"Do you see—merely conditional?" insisted Taberman.

"Yes, I suppose so," assented the other grudgingly.

"I might make a sort of conditional arrangement, then, to go to Plymouth, or perhaps to any other English port not too much out of the way, for a consideration of"—He paused again.

"Ten pounds," suggested the archÆologist.

"Two hundred," said Jerry coolly.

He could have hugged himself with joy at the sound of his own voice naming the sum in such a matter-of-fact fashion. He knew well enough that but for the enormous handicap which circumstances had put upon the archÆologist he would have had no chance whatever to outmanoeuvre him, but this he did not bother to reflect on at the moment and might have had scruples about if he had. He gave himself up to the delight of feeling that he had distinctly the better of the man who had so carried him off his feet at PÆstum, and who had involved him in an affair of the seriousness of which Jerry had had good reason to meditate in the times in the night when his arm kept him awake. It was certainly something to have the upper hand now; and two hundred pounds, which he had named almost at random, multiplied itself in his head into a most satisfactory number of dollars.

"Two hundred pounds!" cried out the archÆologist, nearly jumping out of his chair.

His affected surprise was dramatic, but unfortunately for its effect it was overdone, so that even Jerry felt it to be theatrical.

"Shall we call it two hundred and fifty?" the mate asked, enjoying himself more every minute.

"Two hundred and fifty devils!" shouted Wrenmarsh, who appeared more irritated, it seemed to Jerry, on account of being outmanoeuvred than because the price was so high.

"Not devils—pounds," Tab responded, smiling at his own wit.

"Leave off the two hundred," begged the collector.

"The agreement is only conditional anyway," Jerry said, with something of an air, "but if it seems to you fairer, we'll leave off the fifty, and call it an even two hundred—one for you and one for those precious boxes, to be paid on arrival. I'm not a Neapolitan. Will you go ashore here or wait for the captain?"

"I'll wait for the captain, Mr. Taberman," Wrenmarsh replied. He glowered across the bay for a moment, and then added, "He may not be so infernally exorbitant as you are."

Jerry smiled secretly to himself, and resolved that at least Jack should be persuaded to make no easier terms. Then he went to write a note to summon the captain to come aboard to consider this proposition of taking a passenger.