While Maybury-Reynardson was paying Joyce his nightly visit, I paced the deck with Gartside, silently and in grateful enjoyment of a cigar. As the light at the Needles dwindled and vanished, we became as reflective as befitted one man who was leaving England for several years, and another who had left her for ever. It was not till we had tramped a dozen times up and down that he broke his long silence.
"How did you find Sylvia?" he asked in a tone that showed how his thoughts had been occupied.
I told him the story as she herself had heard it, adding as much of the earlier history as was necessary to convince him.
"Perhaps I'm not leaving so much behind after all," was his comment. "Good luck to the Seraph! He's a nice boy."
"He'll need all the luck he can get," I answered. "You'll get oil and water to mingle quicker than you'll bring those two together. Tell me how it's to be done, Gartside, and you'll put the coping-stone on all your labours."
"I can't help you. I'm not a diplomatist, I'm just a lumpy, good-tempered ox. Sylvia saw that, bless her! Poor Paddy!" he added softly. "He's as fond of her as we any of us were."
I mentioned the trinity of wireless messages.
"That's like Paddy," he said with a laugh. "Well, he's right. You're the only one that's come out on top, and good wishes to you for the future!"
We shook hands and strolled in the direction of our cabins.
"You don't want thanks," I said, "but if you do you know where to come for them."
"Oh well!" I heard him laugh, but there was no laughter in his eyes when the light of the chart-room lamp fell on his face. "If I can't get what I want, there's some satisfaction in helping a friend to get what _he_ wants."
"I'll have that copied out and hung on my shaving-glass," I said. "I shall want that text during the next few months."
"I'm going to bring Sylvia and the Seraph together," I answered in the same tone I had told Joyce I was going to break the Militant Suffrage movement.
"God knows!" I replied with a woeful shake of the head.
"I can see you flying before the laughter like ... tremulous leaves before the wind, and the laughter will pursue you to Paris, where they'll make little songs about you on the boulevards, and the Riviera, where they'll sell your photographs on picture postcards. I can see you fleeing across the Atlantic to ... the immensity of America, and there the Yellow Press, pea-green with frenzy, will pile column of ridicule upon column of invective. Oh, ... do you think it isn't worth while to endure six months' hard labour to amuse the world so profoundly?"