Page:Guy Boothby--A Bid for Fortune.djvu/85

Rh his very heart and stays there, making a better and certainly a healthier man of him.

Does the world ever look so fair as at daybreak, when Dame Nature is still half asleep, and the water lies like a sheet of shimmering glass around him, and the great sun comes up like a ball of gold out of the unknown east with a solemnity that makes one feel almost afraid? Or at night, anchored in some tiny harbour when the lights are twinkling ashore, and the sound of music comes wafted across the water, with a faintness that only adds to its beauty, to harmonise with the tinkling of the waves alongside. Review these things in your mind and then tell me what recreation can compare with yachting?

Not having anything to hurry me, and only my own thoughts to keep me company, I took my time; remained two days in the Solent, sailed round the island, put in a day at Ventnor, and so back to Bournemouth. Then, after a day ashore, I picked up a nice breeze and ran down to Torquay to spend another week sailing slowly back along the coast, touching at various ports, and returning eventually to the place I had first hailed from.

In relating these trifling incidents it is not my wish to bore my readers, but to work up gradually to that strange meeting to which they were the prelude. Now that I can look back in cold blood upon the circumstances that brought it about and reflect how narrowly I escaped missing the one event which was destined to change my whole life, I can hardly realise that I attached such small importance to it at the time. Somehow I have always been a firm believer in Fate, and indeed it would be strange, all the things I am about to tell you considered, if I were not. For when a man has