"You like to be generous," she corrected him, "and because I am a girl, and pretty----"
"Oh, I say," protested Bones feebly--"oh, really you are not pretty at all. I am not influenced by your perfectly horrible young face, believe me, dear old Miss Marguerite. Now, I've a sense of fairness, a sense of justice----"
"Now, listen to me, Mr. Tibbetts." She swung her chair round to face him squarely. "I've got to tell you a little story."
Bones listened to that story with compressed lips and folded arms. He was neither shocked nor amazed, and the girl was surprised.
"Hold hard, young miss," he said soberly. "If this is a jolly old swindle, and if the naughty mariner----"
"His name is Webber, and he is an actor," she interrupted.
"And dooced well he acted," admitted Bones. "Well, if this is so, what about the other johnny who's putting up ten thousand to my fifteen thousand?"
This was a facer for the girl, and Bones glared his triumph.
"That is what the wicked old ship-sailer said. Showed me the money, an' I sent him straight off on the job. He said he'd got a Stock Exchange person named Morris----"
"Morris!" gasped the girl. "That is my step-father!"
"The naughty old One, who married your sainted mother?" he gurgled. "My miss! My young an' jolly old Marguerite!"
He sat down at his desk, yanked open the drawer, and slapped down his cheque-book.
"Three thousand pounds," he babbled, writing rapidly. "You'd better keep it for her, dear old friend of Faust."
"But I don't understand," she said, bewildered.
"Telegram," said Bones briefly. "Read it."
She picked up the buff form and read. It was postmarked from Cowes, and ran:
"In accordance your telegraphed instructions, have sold your schooner-yacht to Mr. Dibbs, who paid cash. Did not give name of owner. Dibbs did not ask to see boat. All he wanted was receipt for money."
"They are calling this afternoon for my fifteen thousand," said Bones, cackling light-headedly. "Ring up jolly old Scotland Yard, and ask 'em to send me all the police they've got in stock!"
The kite wheeling invisible in the blue heavens, the vulture appearing mysteriously from nowhere in the track of the staggering buck, possess qualities which are shared by certain favoured human beings. No newspaper announced the fact that there had arrived in the City of London a young man tremendously wealthy and as tremendously inexperienced.