it was imperative to interview the Venturer's master without delay. More and more impressed with the urgency of the case, Drummond finally took the ship agent by the arm, and dragged him--still denunciatory-to the quay. Here they chartered a sampan.

Lewison, though protesting, began to think that the very decoy he most needed had been provided providentially. The steamer must be delayed till the morrow; all else was nought to him. Otherwise his carefully maturing plans would miscarry in confusion, and much good money be unearned thereby.

The shore shadows were lengthening in the gloom. The rumble of the revolving capstan jarred the stillness of the bay. The metallic clank of the cable chain hauling through the muddy hawse-hole announced that the anchor was being raised. Deep exhortation on the fo'c'sle betokened haste. The sampan surged alongside the Venturer. Whereupon a frowsy-headed man emerged from the lee door of the galley and pushed her off with a pole. Lewison bellowed awesomely.

"The cap'n's busy. An' if yer gets any redder in the face yer'll bust," said the offender genially. "An spatter our paintwork 'orrid.”

Drummond grasped at the rope ladder handing over the steamer's side. At that moment Fairton appeared at the top.

"What do you want?" he demanded with brusqueness.

"To speak with you, captain, please," Drummond answered civilly.

"Speak away then." The invitation was not encouraging.

"You have got my niece aboard," interposed the angry Lewison. "She will return to me at once."

Fairton looked along the deck to where a slight dark figure was holding on to a twisted wire shroud. Her eyes were wide with dismay.

"No, she won't!" he answered curtly. "You're breaking the law"-the voice of its upholder was shrill-"I'll have you arrested for seducin' her away," he screamed.

"I will marry her first!" Fairton was speaking with quietness. "Now, have you done?"

"You just stop till mornin' for the rest of your crew, an' give me back the girl," clamored the ship agent. "What for?"

This was maddening. The listener rocked in the boat with wrath. "I'll give her what for when I get her," roared the outraged man.

"And I'll see you damned first," was the blunt rejoinder from above. "Shove off there!"

The Chinese boatman was hunting unconcernedly along his pigtail for an irritating insect. Drummond was holding on to the lower rung of the ship's ladder. Suddenly the gloom was stung by the flash of a revolver. Lewison had fired point-blank at the girl on deck.

Then there was a concert-as the cook of the Venturer, who had been an interested observer, subsequently expressed it. Drummond himself knocked the smoking pistol out of Lewison's hand into the sea. Then he sprang up the ladder. With his foot he pushed the sampan clear. A bubbling at the steamer's stern answered to the sudden slow grind of the half-speed engines. The Venturer was under way, and the native craft wallowed in the wash.

Lewison subsided with violence on to a thwart, giving vent to incoherent splutters as he wrung the slops which the cook had adroitly heaved over him from his eyes. His protesting roars grew fainter. The Venturer drew away into the smother of the night.

In the chart-room Beatrice Dennis stood again before the captain, with burning cheeks. She had drawn back

against the far doorway, as though to seek a refuge from the sudden shamed comprehension which stormed at her bating heart. She was in the presence of a crisis from which no girl can come unchanged.

"Well, you can't go back to Lewison now," said Fairton with deliberation. "Will you put me ashore at Port Arthur?" she asked at length.

"If you wish it," he answered gravely. "But what will you do there?" "Oh, what does it matter what I do?" she said. "Perhaps I can get work in some hospital as nurse. It has never mattered to anybody what happens to I'm used to that."

me.

"I think you will find it does matter," Bernard Fairton told her gently. But Beatrice flung on reckless, unheeding, almost as if she wished to hurt him:

"I will tell you. Lewison had a son -I was a mere girl-I was in love with him; his father sent him to Shanghai. There he married a rich girl; it was three years ago. Not that I care now," she cried with heaving breast.

Fairton scrutinized her flawless face wistfully. The lines of her lifted chin and delicate throat were perfect against the background of the chartroom graining. The love of such a maiden must be wonderful to win!

"And you! what must you think of me?" she cried, still flaming. "You see what I am-unwomanly, unmannered. How do you know that my being here now is not part of some plot to lure you, as it is?"

The reply came with strange promptitude. "I can read it in your eyes,” he just had time to answer as Drummond entered. Though how he was able to do this when they refused to meet his own was not explained.

The captain's mood altered. "You've come aboard my ship unasked." he said harshly. "What is your business?"

Drummond told him.

"Well, you had better lend a hand then; we shall want it," opined the skipper surlily. "Though probably it will be bad for your underwriters," he added with a touch of malice. For Fairton was annoyed at the other's interruption at that moment. But Drummond refused to be ruffled.

"What did you mean by saying that the ship had been sold to the Japanese, Miss Dennis?" He swung round on the girl with calculated abruptness.

"You've been eavesdropping!" was her prompt parry to this.

Drummond smiled unabashed. The girl turned to Fairton.

"Do you trust your new crew-such as you've got?"

"They are only some dozen Chinamen," he replied rather uneasily.

"Ye-es." She hesitated. Her suspicions were only conjectures after all.

"And we have got to go on now and take our chance," Fairton concluded; in which Lloyd's representative acquiesced.

The Venturer headed seawards. The European officers were alert; nothing seemed to escape their vigilant observation. The attitude of the Chinese crew proved one of submissive obedience, till with the gray of the next evening came the danger-and the

snow.

The latter had been threatening for some time. The glass was falling steadily; in the biting cold the mercury in the thermometer had shrunk almost to the bulb; now the nor'-easter from the Gulf of Pechili drove the snowflakes swift and dazzling over the sullen sea. The air was dense with fluttering whiteness. Thicker and thicker it drifted heavily from the livid dulness of the sky.

Snow at sea is deadly. It blinds the peering eyes under the knitted brows of the men on watch. Yet Fairton drove the Venturer onwards at top speed, bor

ing her way through the pall of mutfling snow-clouds. Time might be everything. It was safer to take the risks of navigation in the white obscurity than to linger in the hostile zone of war.

The Miaotao Islands had been left astern. Leaning forward over the canvas wind screen of the bridge, Beatrice Dennis strove to pierce the murky masses of the oncoming night of snow. Strain as she might, she could see nothing. It was two bells in the first dogwatch.

She had been enveloped in an ulster of the captain's-with resolution. Her face was puckered with the driving cold; her eyes ached in the blinding glare of the mist. Yet there was a dauntlessness about her which grew with the proximity of the peril and the need. The hours were speeding quickly, but each one merely brought renewed anticipations as to the difficulties of the next. The girl had refused steadfastly to remain below. Between her and Fairton a tacit tie seemed to have sprung into strange existence, by which they were bound to meet whate'er befell them side by side; for life at sea draws people very close together; in this it is so different from the land. which separates conventionally apart. Something was going to happen. Beatrice felt her pulses stir as she scented it at hand.

"What's yonder to starboard?"

She stood, a figure of white, listening with eager intentness in the woolly silence. One hand was on the frozen bridge-rail, the other pointed seawards as she spoke. Fairton caught up the binoculars and searched earnestly over the surface of the sea. The distant pant of other engines was faintly audible.

He wiped the glasses with his sleeve and passed them to Drummond. The look of sleeplessness and long vigil vanished; stern pugnacity hardened on his

face instead. At that moment came a hail from aft.

"Heave to, that ship!" a voice rang out peremptorily in English. Through the curtaining snow a Japanese torpedo-boat slid towards the Venturer. The quick-firer on her forward deck sidled round ominously; its sights aligned themselves with swiftness on the Venturer's wheel.

"Where are you bound for?" came the crisp call across the water. Then. without waiting for answer, followed the sharp command:

"Stop! or we fire."

With despair in his heart Fairton rang off his engines. The shrill tinkle of the telegraph sounded the knell of his hopes. Escape from the wasp-like enemy was impossible. The torpedoboat closed inwards, sheered against the Venturer, and the fenders rasped along her muddy gray hull.

The crew had come on deck, aroused by the shouts. One of the Chinamen was slinking aft.

In that tense moment Beatrice felt her wrist seized. "Do you understand Japanese?" Drummond whispered to her through dry lips. She assented with quick intelligence. "Then slip after that chap there, and listen sharp!"

Round the engine-room combings the deck was wet and slippery with halfmelting snow; aft its accumulation deadened her light footfall. The last daylight was waning, and the darkness was sharpened with frost. The Venturer rolled lifelessly in the swell, forging slightly ahead with her own momentum. The torpedo-boat dropped a little astern, and bobbed uneasily alongside. By her conning tower stood a diminutive figure who was speaking earnestly to the man of the steamer's crew at the rail. Beatrice clenched her little fist involuntarily at the words. Crouching in the shadow of the deck-house. her wits were never SO

keen as at that moment of peril when she needed them. With the best of women it is often so.

As she listened motionless her eyes flashed. The colloquy overheard was brief. A few questions were asked, some instructions given. The girl's heart pulsed with restrained excitement. Then the Japanese officer snapped his watch-case in the blurr of the binnacle lamp, and assented with final curtness to something urged by his countryman on the Venturer's deck. Neither of the speakers noticed for a moment the slim young form in the darkness so silent and so still.

The officer waved his hand; the suspense ended. After a second's pregnant pause the torpedo-boat put her helm over and vanished phantom-like into the snow-storm. Her port light winked balefully out into the patches of the night as she disappeared. The swirl of water from her twin screws eddied thickly for a minute and died down. She left behind her men on the bridge of the cargo-boat astounded, almost dumb, at their escape.

"What, in Heaven's name, is the meaning of that?" said Fairton hoarsely. Mechanically he jammed the telegraph handle back to full-speed ahead. The big steamer vibrated again with energy. Once more she shoved her nose into the gloom of her course.

Beatrice Dennis came through the darkness into the gleam of the chartroom. Her face was pallid as the snow without. She met Drummond unflinching. "Well?" was all he said.

"Call the captain," she ordered. Fairton came at once.

"Can you get that man of the crew who spoke to the Japanese in here alone? Only be ready not to let him join the others again and give the alarm-if I'm right."

Mongolian; in his black beady eyes was the glitter of fanaticism. Behind the two men another form lurked with mysteriousness.

"Pull his pigtail!" decreed Beatrice, in an odd voice.

At this brutal command the captain stared, and the owner of the pigtail squirmed suddenly like a trapped thing. But Drummond instantly grasped her meaning. He seized that appendage, and gave it a wrench with deftness. It came off in his hand.

"Hell!" The face of the disguised Japanese lit with fury. But the cook, who was a resourceful man and unseen behind him, swiftly flung a very dirty sack, which had once held potatoes, over his head. This modified the subsequent struggle.

Α few minutes later Lieutenant Okara, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was successfully propelled along the deck, and hustled without ceremony into a store pantry. There he was locked securely amid the butter casks and onions. His captor, the cook, lit the pipe of gratification outside and grinned at the sound of the prisoner's bumpings.

There was a great shortage of firemen in the stokehole. Said the engineer when summoned to a conference by his captain:

"Mon, there'll be nae insubordeenation wi' the pairsons in question while me an' the second obsairve their welfare affectionate wi' the peestols o' precaution. If ye can deespose o' the wily deevils on deck, sir, we'll e'en make Port Arthur yet."

"Carry on then," agreed Fairton rather sombrely. "But spread them out remorselessly if there's trouble."

"Never ye fear, sir," averred the brawny Scotchman with solemnity. "Well aye handle the roubles o' safety still."

And so the Venturer ploughed steaming into the blackness, while her offi

cers proceeded to deal with others of the native deck hands.

From the next masquerading Chinaman tackled, coercion extracted information; and he was induced to reveal to the despised foreign girl, who spoke his language so easily, the whereabouts of a package which Beatrice greatly desired to locate. Thereupon the steward took charge of this informant with the slanting, shifty gaze. While held by the shoulders on his way to the lazarette the Englishman's foot was suitably applied. The victim howled at a treatment so convincing, and the chart-room furniture was rearranged after the scrimmage. Then the fo'c'stle was entered, and cleared at the point of persuasive revolver barrels of the few occupants left there.

"Oh, be very careful," besought Beatrice with ashy cheeks and scared pulsating nostrils. She pointed to a heavy box stowed under a bunk. "It's the bursting charges for the holds," she said.

Thus admonished, the movers of that package were tenderness itself. Just as it was being very gingerly consigned to the fish of the deep-sea soundings, a hidden Japanese sailor sprang at Fairton with savage despair from behind a winch. The two men reeled on the slithering deck; an unsheathed knife gleamed dully.

Drummond was occupied in lowering the explosives overboard. Fairton. taken unawares, was underneath in the fray. Beatrice never paused.

In that fleeting second she knew that she loved, and the knowledge possessed her soul. Such an awakening is unaccountable, but nevertheless it can be true. He was her man there, and he was fighting for his very life. Her strong little hands wrenched at the coat-collar of the writhing Japanese with desperate energy.

He wriggled savagely, turned over.

and stabbed at his new opponent with madness. The blade of the weapon ripped the sleeve of her jacket, and the blood spurted from her wounded arm. Then the flash of a revolver singed her hair.

"That chap's become an ancestor," remarked Drummond, coolly re-pocketing his pistol. "My God! you're hurt."

"It's only a scratch," she panted. But Fairton was on his feet again. His arm was round her waist. Everything else was forgotten in his passionate fear for her. He was white to the lips.

"How dare you take such a risk-for me?" he cried.

"It's all right now," she answered humbly. Though she was not thinking of herself. She staggered with queer helplessness against the hatchway.

He half carried her into the chartroom, strong in a wild sense of joy that somehow he should be the possessor of this girl who had been mauled in the act of protecting him. Drummond bandaged her arm. He was quiet and skilful, with a strangely tender touch. Nothing seemed to come amiss to bim.

The warmth of the fire, the brandy that Fairton fetched for her, perhaps some inner consciousness of feelings unmasked in the peril, brought a dusky glow of color into that fair young face, so cold and set. She sat up suddenly with girlish dignity.

"I'm better; I was a fool to faint. Do you understand it all now?" she challenged, with bright blue eyes.

"Don't talk!" But the patient demurred mutinously.

"I shall if I want to. You're not to scold. Listen! I heard the torpedoboat officer tell part, and I guessed the rest. The Japanese don't want to capture you. They would rather sink you in Port Arthur Channel. They mean to jam the Vanturer there to bottle up