Page:Guy Boothby--A Bid for Fortune.djvu/184



Pescadore, if she was slow, was certainly sure, and so the thirty-sixth day after our departure from Port Said, as recorded in the previous chapter, she landed us safe and sound at Williamstown, which, as all the Australian world knows, is one of the principal rail way termini, and within an hour's journey, of Melbourne. Throughout the voyage nothing occurred worth chronicling, if I except the curious behaviour of Lord Beckenham, who, for the first week or so, seemed sunk in a deep stupor from which neither chaff nor sympathy could rouse him. From morning till night he mooned aimlessly about the decks, had visibly to pull himself together to answer such questions as might be addressed to him, and never by any chance sustained a conversation further than a few odd sentences. To such a pitch did this depression at last bring him that, the day after we left Aden, I felt it my duty to take him to task and try to bully or coax him out of it. We were standing at the time under the bridge and a little forrard of the chart-room.

"Come," I said, "I want to know what's the matter with you? You've been giving us all the miserables lately, and from the look of your face at the present