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 ringed hand. “There, there, don’t you feel badly about it: it wasn’t your fault. They’ll get us off soon, and we can have just as much fun here as we would sailing around. More, perhaps: motion seems to have had a bad effect on the party. I wonder” Fairchild and his people had not yet arrived: before each vacant place its grapefruit, innocent and profound. Surely just the prospect of more grapefruit couldn’t have driven them Mrs. Maurier followed her gaze.

“Perhaps it’s just as well,” she murmured.

“Anyway, I’ve always wanted to be shipwrecked,” Mrs. Wiseman went on. “What do they call it? scuttled the ship, isn’t it? But surely Dawson and Julius couldn’t have thought of this, though.” Mrs. Maurier, brooding above her plate, raised her eyes, cringing. “No, no,” the other answered herself hastily, “of course not: that’s silly. It just happened, as things do. But let this be a lesson to you children, never to lay yourselves open to suspicion,” she added looking from the niece to the nephew. The steward appeared with coffee and Mrs. Maurier directed him to leave the gentlemen’s grapefruit until it suited their pleasure to come for it.

“They couldn’t have done it if they’d wanted to,” the niece replied. “They don’t know anything about machinery. Josh could have done it. He knows all about automobile motors. I bet you could fix it for ’em if you wanted to, couldn’t you, Gus?”

He didn’t seem to have heard her at all. He finished his breakfast, eating with a steady and complete preoccupation, then thrusting his chair back he asked generally for a cigarette. His sister produced a package from somewhere. It bore yet faint traces of pinkish scented powder, and Miss Jameson said sharply:

“I wondered who took my cigarettes. It was you, was it?”

“I thought you’d forgot ’em, so I brought ’em up with me.”