Mrs. Curtis was stout, so she yielded perforce to lack of breath, and Devar was able to explain smilingly that he, and none other, was responsible for the item in the newspapers.
"The fact is that I took a great liking to John D.," he said. "He is such a real good fellow, and so sublimely unconscious of his own merits, that I wanted to surprise him by starting a modest boom in the press, so I sent a wireless message about him to a journalistic friend in New York. I wondered why the reporters did not get hold of him when they came aboard at the quarantine station, but I remember now that, by some curious trick of fate, he and I stowed ourselves away in a part of the ship where no one was likely to find us, and I clean forgot to put them on his track when I went below."
"I guess my nephew has attended to the booming proposition on his own account," said Horace, getting under way at last.
Devar laughed, but Mrs. Curtis was shocked.
"Horace!" she cried indignantly, "that's the only unkind thing I've heard you say in years. Oh, yes,"--for her husband had spread his hands in mild protest--"I know you didn't mean it, but barbed shafts of humor often fall in places where they hurt, and it is terrible to think of your nephew being mixed up in a murder, and an abduction, and----"
She broke off in mid-career, and fixed a stern eye on Devar.
"Are you quite sure he didn't get flirting with some giddy young thing on board?" she demanded. "I've heard and read of some strange goings-on among people crossing the Atlantic. I could tell you of two marriages and no less than five divorces which----"
Devar was a polite young man, but he thought the situation called for firmness.
"To the best of my belief, your nephew never so much as spoke to any lady on the ship," he vowed. "He read a good deal, and played cards occasionally, and walked the decks with me when the weather permitted, but he did not even mention a woman's name except your own, madam."
"The marvel is that he mentioned us at all," said Horace.
Devar thought in his own mind, that the elder Curtis might be ponderous in body and speech but he certainly revealed horse sense when he opened his mouth.
"And whose fault was that, I should like to know?" cried Mrs. Curtis. "Didn't your own brother quarrel with you because you said he ought to have married a woman of some stability of character, and not a pretty, feather-headed girl who spent her days reading poetry and her nights in attending lectures, and who didn't begin to understand the A.B.C. of a wife's domestic duties?"