easily enough keep him there with you for ten or fifteen minutes!"
"You mean the chances are that he'll simply throw on anything that's nearest him—a blanket or a bathrobe, if it's late enough?"
"Yes."
"But there's the captain!" objected McKinnon. "There's the scene we went through last night."
"Then wait until the captain has gone to his cabin for the night. The later it is when you call Ganley the better. I can be waiting. The moment he has left his cabin, locked or unlocked, I can be there making my search."
McKinnon looked down at her, puzzled, not by her proposal, but by the sheer fact that she could make it. He began to feel that some kindred and companionable love for the casually adventurous linked them together; he began to realise that, for all her sex, she was not without her youthful and full-blooded relish for the hazard of any true game that was worth its candle.
"Suppose Ganley suspects something?"
"He can suspect nothing if we only do our part of it in the right way," admonished the youthful intrigante before him. "He lives in daily dread that you may receive messages about the Locombian uprising, or his own con-
