Cartoner turned, and with one finger made an imaginary design on the soft pile of the table-cloth. Captain Cable looked at it critically, and after a moment's reflection admitted in an absent voice that his hopes for eternity were exceedingly small.
“You are too much for me,” he said, after a pause. “You that deal in politics and the like.”
“And the other man's name is Kosmaroff,” said Cartoner.
“That's it--a Russian,” answered Captain Cable, rising, and looking at the clock. His movements were energetic and very quick for his years. He carried with him the brisk atmosphere of the sea and the hardness of a life which tightens men's muscles and teaches them to observe the outward signs of man and nature.
“It beats me,” he said. “But I've told you all I can--all, perhaps, that you want to hear. For it seems that you are putting two and two together already. I think I've done right. At any rate, I'll stand by it. It makes me uneasy to think of that stuff having been below the _Minnie's_ hatches.”
“It makes me uneasy, too,” said Cartoner. “Wait a minute till I put on another coat. I am going out. We may as well go down together.”
He came back a moment later, having changed his coat. He was attaching the small insignia of a foreign order to the lapel.
“Going to a swarree?” asked Cable, as between men of the world.
“I am going to look for a man I want to see to-night, and I think I shall find him, as you say, at a soiree,” answered Cartoner, gravely.
Out in the street he paused for a moment. A cab was already waiting, having dashed up from the club stand.
“By-the-way,” he said, “I shall not be able to come down and see the _Minnie_ this time. I shall be off by the eight o'clock train to-morrow morning.”
“Yes, I am going abroad again,” answered Cartoner, and there was a sudden ring of exultation in his voice. For this was after all, a man of action who had strayed into a profession of which the strength is to sit still.
The Mangles passed the winter at Warsaw, and there learned the usual lesson of the traveller: that countries reputed hot or cold are neither so hot nor so cold as they are represented. The winter was a hard one, and Warsaw, of all European cities, was, perhaps, the last that any lady would select to pass the cold months in.