Varney was wrong in one thing: Mr. Carstairs's Cypriani was not ready to start anywhere at half a day's notice. For that reason it did not start for Hunston on the following afternoon. As always happens, the preparations for the little expedition took four times as long as anybody would have thought possible.

For these delays no blame could be attached to Peter Maginnis. He had no getting ready to do beyond bidding his father's man to pack him for a week, and obtaining from his hatter's, at an out-of-season cut-price, an immense and peculiar Panama with an offensive plaid band. Possibly it was the only hat of its kind in the world. One might picture the manufacturer as having it made up as an experiment, becoming morose when he looked at it, and ordering his superintendent to make no more like it at the peril of his life.

Peter, however, was delighted with it. Gazing at himself with smirking satisfaction in the hat-shop mirror, he ordered the old one sent home and was all ready to go to Hunston and kidnap Mary Carstairs.

But other preparations could not be completed with such speedy satisfaction. The yacht had to coal, take on supplies, and pick up two or three extra men for the crew. A Sunday came in and threw everything back a day. Lastly the sailing-master's wife, whom Mr. Carstairs was sending along to take charge of Mary on the homeward trip, chanced to be down with an influenza.

As the details of getting ready multiplied about him, Varney's interest in his novel undertaking imperceptibly grew. The thing had come upon him so unexpectedly that it had not yet by any means lost its strangeness. To the old friend of his mother's girlhood, Elbert Carstairs, he was sincerely devoted, though knowing him for an indulgent man whose indulgences were chiefly of himself. But when, responding to his excited summons that night, he had sat and listened while Mr. Carstairs unfolded his mad little domestic plot, he had been first utterly amazed and then utterly repelled. And it was not until a final sense of the old man's genuine need was borne in upon him, of his loneliness, his helplessness, and his entire dependence upon him, Varney, that he had consented to undertake the extraordinary commission.

In a sense, it was all simply preposterous. Here was he, Laurence Varney, in sane mind, of law-abiding habits and hitherto of tolerable standing in the community, solemnly pledged to go and steal the person of a child, in defiance and contempt of the statutes of all known nations. And the place where this lawless deed was to be done was not Ruritania or the hazy dominions of Prince Otto, but a commonplace, humdrum American town, not an hour and a half from his office chair by the expresses.

In going about this task he was to conduct himself with the frankness and straightforwardness of a sneak-thief. Not a soul in New York was to know where he had gone. Not a soul in Hunston must dimly suspect what he had come for. It must be gum-shoe work from start to finish, and the Cypriani's motto would be the inspiring word, "Sh-h-h." Though he had to find a nondescript child whom he did not know from Eve, he was forbidden to do it in a natural, easy, and dashing way. He could not ring her mother's door-bell, ask for her, throw a meal-sack over her head, and whip his waiting horses to a gallop. No, he must beat the tall grasses before the old homestead until such time as she chose to walk abroad alone. Really, when you came to think of it, it was an asinine sort of proposition.

But when Mary did come out of that house, he saw that the fun would begin. A well brought-up, moneyed, petted and curled girl of twelve was no easy pawn in anybody's game. He could not win her love by a mere offer of gum-drops. In fact, getting acquainted was likely to be a difficult matter, taxing his ingenuity to a standstill. But he entertained no doubts of his ability to do it, sooner or later.

"Not to put too fine a point on it," mused he, glancing out of his twentieth story window, "they flock to me, children do. I'm their good old Uncle Dudley. But why the deuce isn't she five years younger?"

Clearly, it was the next step that was the most delicate: getting Mary aboard the yacht. This was both the crux and the finale of the whole thing: for Uncle Elbert was to be waiting for them, in a closed carriage, at a private dock near 130th Street (Peter remaining in Hunston to notify him by telephone of the start down), and Varney's responsibilities were over when the Cypriani turned her nose homeward. But here lay the thin ice. If anything should happen to go wrong at the moment when they were coaxing Mary on the yacht, if there was a leak in their plans or anybody suspected anything, he saw that the situation might be exceedingly awkward. The penalties for being fairly caught with the goods promised to be severe. As to kidnapping, he certainly remembered reading in the newspapers that some States punished it with death. At any rate, maybe the natives would try to thrash him and Peter. In hopeful moments he conjured up visions of the deuce to pay.

But, after all, he was going to Hunston, whether he liked it or not, simply because Uncle Elbert had asked him. The lonely old gentleman, he knew, loved him like a son: he had turned straight to him in his hour of need. This had touched the young man, and had finally made up his mind for him. Moreover Mary, a spoiled little piece who was suffered to set her smug childish will against the combined wills of both her parents, aroused his keenest antipathy. To put her in her place, to teach her that children must obey their parents in the Lord, was a duty to society, to the State. What Uncle Elbert wanted with such a child, he could not conceive; but since he did want her, have her he should. Tilting back his office chair and running his hand through his hair, Varney longed to spank her.

This thought came to him, definitely and for about the seventh time, at half-past one o'clock on the third day, Monday. At the same moment, his telephone-bell rang sharply. It was the sailing-master to say that his good spouse had come aboard and that everything on the Cypriani was in readiness for the start.

"I'll be on board inside of an hour," said Varney.

He telephoned to Uncle Elbert, telephoned to Peter, and locked up his desk. To his office he casually gave out that pressing business matters were calling him out of town for a day or two.

The two young men had been as furtive as possible about their proposed journey. They had not met since the night Varney had dangled the hope of jail and disgrace into Peter's lightening face, and so, or otherwise, cajoled him into going along. Both of them had kept carefully away from the Cypriani. Now they proceeded to her by different routes, and reached her at different times, Peter first. Their luggage had gone aboard before them, and there was no longer a thing to wait for. At three o'clock, on Varney's signal, the ship's bell sounded, her whistle shrieked, and she slid off through the waters of the bay.

About the start there was nothing in the least dramatic: they had merely begun moving through the water and that was all. The Cypriani, for all her odd errand, was merely one of a thousand boats which indifferently crossed each other's wakes in one of the most crowded harbors in the world.

"For all the lime-light we draw," observed Maginnis, drinking in the freshening breeze, "we might be running up to Harlem to address the fortnightly meeting of a Girls' Friendly Society."

Varney said: "Give us a chance, will you?"