Doloria breakfasted in her room, but from the galley I sent a note on her tray, among other important things saying that I was about to break the news to Monsieur. In her reply, surreptitiously delivered by Echochee, who was smiling, she wrote—among still more important things—"for Heaven's sake, break it into tiny little pieces!" With this in mind, although having no idea how I should succeed, I came up by way of the fo'castle and walked aft to where Tommy and he were smoking.

The open safe and three or four pipes belonging to Gates lay on the floor between them, while the old skipper who had taken the wheel was silently convulsed with laughter as he watched the puzzled expression on Monsieur's face and the innocence on Tommy's. My opportunity seeming favorable, I said:

"Professor, last night the Princess decided to give up Azuria. She's promised to stay here and rule me; so I'm giving notice that neither you, nor any one else, can take her."

He listened to this with more tolerance than surprise, giving Tommy a look that implied his distress to see my prostration taking the form of hallucinations. But Tommy added:

"It's on the square. Jack's put one over, and all he asks is your blessing. Give it like a good sport, and, we'll drink their health."

"You are cut-upping," he gasped, staring with wide eyes—that perceptibly narrowed as he glanced down at the pipes.

"Call it what you please," Tommy imperturbably replied, though I knew that he was not at all sure of his ground, "but the Princess and Jack are going to be married, and I rather fancy I'm to be best man. It would be right decent of you, as the special emissary plenipotentiary extraordinary fat-and-hairy agent from Azuria, to give the bride away. I'm only suggesting it."

But the professor was on his feet, sputtering and waving his arms in a torrent of rage.

"It shall not be, it shall not be!" he cried. Then suddenly he began to laugh, looking at us with a superior air of cunning that made my flesh creep. "Why, you are as pigmies with your childish schemes! You suppose I have gone this far without arranging everything to circumvent you, or anything you could do? Bah!"

"Circumvent till you're black in the face, you beloved old rag doll," Tommy gave a mirthless chuckle, "but the Princess doesn't go back with you—and that's a cinch. She's going home with me, to visit my sister. Don't you try to follow her, either, for I'm giving it to you straight that you'd last about seventeen seconds in Kentucky. Yes, Professor, I'd say that in Jefferson county seventeen seconds would be a right venerable age for you!"

"That shows what small children you are," he laughed contemptuously. "The minute we touch land I order the first police to arrest her—and on my authority he will not dare refuse! She is still a subject of Azuria, and not of age according to its laws! Then I will lay the matter with our representatives in Washington, and your President, fearing to disturb the consummation of his League of Nations, will return her, of course! This for your threats!" He snapped his finger at us and began to fill his pipe.

Who'd ever have thought the League of Nations would treat me that way? Tommy saw murder rising in my heart and gave me a warning look. Yet I could see from his puckered forehead that he was pretty well up against a stone wall. Our only hope of success, so far as my mentality could work it out, was instantaneous manslaughter.

Finally, amid a complete silence and under the professor's supercilious smile, Tommy got up and went below. Had I tried to enter the cabin, the old fellow would have followed me.

A sailor passed aft and whispered to Gates, who surrendered the wheel, went forward and disappeared. Ten minutes later he came back and took a seat near us; affecting to be at his ease, but making a very poor go at it. Soon after him came Tommy, carrying open in his hands a large book, calf-bound and old. For on the cabin shelves my father kept a lot of truck in the way of old books that no one ever read. I saw, also, that Tommy and Gates had reached an understanding.

Of course, I was bursting to know what those conspirators had up their sleeves. Tommy stood in the middle of the cockpit, looking serious and thoughtful. Now, in an impressive voice, he said:

"Monsieur, Gates has been good enough to get out his copy of American Marine Law, pertaining to the obligations and powers of captains of American vessels sailing upon salt water. Perhaps, after this brief preamble, it would be tautological for me to continue with what your overly acute mind must have by this time grasped; nevertheless, you will pardon me if I read you a paragraph, that goes as follows: 'In cases of emergency, where it is evident that a vessel can not in the required time reach a port wherein there may with certainty be found a civil officer of the United States of America, or the captain of such vessel in any other circumstances deems the request of the principals a proper one and of sufficient warrant, he is thereby, and is hereby, endowed with the right to perform the ceremony of marriage according to the civil code of said United States, and such ceremony, properly attested by two witnesses, shall constitute the bonds of holy matrimony before the world.'"

At the beginning of this Monsieur had sprung up, but before Tommy concluded he again sank into his chair, breathing fast and blinking.

"Gates," Tommy asked, "do you consider the request of these principals a proper one and of sufficient warrant?"

"I do, sir," Gates answered.

"You consider that the emergency in every way justifies you to perform this ceremony of marriage?"

"I do, sir."

"Then, Jack," he turned to me, "suppose we say high noon. It's a fashionable hour, and gives you a little while to primp up."

I gasped at him, unable to believe my ears; but before I could speak Monsieur was again raving.

"It shall not!" he yelled. "I say it shall not; for now I, too, play a card!" And drawing from his pocket a paper, discolored by wear and age, he flourished it in our faces, crying: "By this authority I claim her as my ward; both of us Azurians; and in the name of my country I forbid the marriage!"

"Gates," Tommy asked, without batting an eye at Monsieur's grandiloquent outburst—which seemed to me the absolute frustration of our plan, "we don't know this man. He's a tramp we picked up at Key West. Do you recognize his credentials, or would you say they're forgeries?"

"They look like forgeries to me, Mr. Thomas," the old skipper answered at once, not being within ten feet of Monsieur and his paper. "If I'm mistaken, sir, I'll apologize when we get ashore, but I carn't see any reason why the ceremony shouldn't take place at high noon. If that's too early, Mr. Jack, we can sail back to Key West—or New Oreleans."

"But my authority," the professor cried, seeming on the verge of apoplexy.

Tommy closed the calf-bound book and tossed it over to me, then turned Monsieur good-naturedly around and pointed to the Stars and Stripes flying at our main peak.

"While you're on this yacht, my friend," he laughed, "that's the authority, and don't you forget it!"

I glanced at the volume of Marine Law he had tossed to me. It was Gibbon's DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE!

Monsieur's beard began to twitch curiously. I thought at first he was really intending to make the best of things, but suddenly two great tears squeezed from his eyes and rolled lumberingly over his cheeks; then, as an unbridled torrential storm breaks in the tropics, he threw himself face down upon the cushions and wept—piteously.

Tommy and I were thunderstruck. It gives one a weird feeling to see a man shaken with grief. I was helpless and, there's no denying it, just a little remorseful. As quick in sympathy as he was in resource, Tommy crossed and put a hand on the old fellow's shoulder, saying gently:

"Buck up, Professor. This kind of thing won't do, you know!"

Then my surprise was most complete. Sitting now, face buried in his hands, he brokenly told a story that at times brought tears to our own eyes.

When he finished I had visualized a scene begun more than thirty years ago in the Royal Palace of Azuria: an honorable young doctor, Court physician, voluntarily surrendering his appointment because he loved the King's younger daughter—Doloria's aunt; the old ruler's searching eyes that sympathized even while they censured—the aged hand that pressed with understanding even while it took the proffered resignation. Then the young doctor's quick departure; his plunge into the Universities, trusting absorption of the sciences to act as a panacea for his grief. Years later his return to Azuria; their pure love still burning, though unexpressed. At last the kidnaping; the quick preparations for pursuit; and finally the girl, herself, sweet with many confessions, bringing in her own hands the old King's "authority"—this paper before us—which commanded him to return the little Princess by any means he could, his reward being the fulfillment of his heart's desire.

"And now," he moaned, rocking to and fro, "after seventeen years of searching, I have won only to lose!"

Truly, I was touched. Tommy turned quickly away and blinked at the horizon. Yet neither of us knew that all of this time Doloria had been standing in the companionway door. She now crossed swiftly and sat by the weeping man, impulsively drawing his grizzled head to her shoulder as a mother might have comforted a hurt child. But toward me her face was turned, and I saw that her startled eyes spoke into mine the entreating message which distracted her—telling me that we must acknowledge this claim of Monsieur's poor heart before our own could ever be happy; asking me what to do, since his title to happiness came first. Yet all that her lips spoke was the trembling whisper:

"Oh, Jack!"

But he, with a new determination, sat quickly upright. The warmth of a woman's sympathetic arms upon a life that had been without comfort, the quick intuition that she was pleading for him at a great cost to herself, stirred the fineness of his nature, and he cried:

"Never! I have lived this long, and this long suffered, enough to know the irony of that royal barrier! Your aunt and I, dear child, are passing toward the shadows of life, while you and my boy Jack are just starting out. Your happiness shall not be cindered upon a false altar—I swear it!"

"Good old boy," Tommy murmured. "Do you mean that, honest?"

"Pardieu, have I not sworn it?"

"And you wouldn't try to muddy the water again if I confessed that our Marine Law was a hocus-pocus?"

"What is that hocus-pocus?"

"A no-such-a-thing."

"SacrÉ bleu! I see! Pipes and iron safes and hocus-pocus! But I do not care!" He turned to Doloria and, taking one of her hands, said: "You, mon ami, shall find your heart's best desire. It is I who say it!—I, who have the authority!" The way he clung to that authority was really pathetic.

"It occurs to me, Monsieur," Tommy crossed and looked down at them—and I saw that Doloria read in his eyes the sadness of one who must remain outside while others pass through to happiness—"that you, too, can find your heart's best desire. Jack and our sweet Princess will be leaving for Azuria as soon as passports are procurable. Now, the day they arrive, you might be moseying about the railroad station, borrow her for an hour, and personally conduct her to the palace. The late lamented King's royal authority contained no stipulation about the missing child being returned in a state of single blessedness, therefore the reward is yours. Add that up, and see if it doesn't spell Eureka!"

Doloria turned to Monsieur with a glorious smile and, being nearest, received the first hug as the light of Tommy's reasoning burst upon him. Then he bounded up and hugged me; but Gates and Tommy ran away, the cowards, yet did a lot of laughing from a distance. And now the forward watch called something, at the same time pointing off our port bow. Low upon the water lay Miami.

Excitedly we took turns focusing the binoculars on it, and after a little as we drew fairly near Tommy, with a puzzled look, asked:

"Who are those people on your Colonel's dock?"

"My father, maybe. I wired him to come."

"Boy, I mean the petticoats! Look at 'em—there're two!"

"Can you make out their faces?" I asked, having a good time all to myself; for here was my chance to return an obligation in the matter of courtships which, if not cancelled, would furnish the versatile Tommy with an anecdote I should never outlive.

"Not yet," he mumbled, squinting more closely.

"One's probably the Mater," I suggested.

"I hope so," he smiled, lowering the binoculars. "What was the toast you gave her, Jack?—'if romance and adventure are alive I'll bring them home to you!'—wasn't that it?"

"Yes, and we sailed out on that quest only seventeen days ago. It seems incredible, doesn't it!"

"It sure does," he chuckled, once more raising the glasses. "You've put on seventeen pounds, too,—besides a special chunk of 120, or thereabouts, which you gained the night of the rescue. That's some record, boy! See here," he asked quickly, "who the deuce are those people, anyway! One has a mighty familiar look!" And I could hardly keep from laughing as I answered:

"I think the Mater went by Louisville and picked up Nell——"

"Good Lord, I see her," he yelled, so instantly and irrepressibly delirious with joy that he let my binoculars fall overboard, the chump.

But now I saw that Doloria—which was the other name for romance and adventure—had slipped away from Monsieur; she had gone forward and, all alone, was leaning against the foremast, gazing dreamily at this new world and these new people who waited to take her to their hearts. So I forgot Tommy, God bless him!—he may have known a little about women, after all!