Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/103

 completed, we arrived at Athens, and at Athens lay a trim, rakish-looking English yacht, with her ensign flying and her fore-topsail loosed, waiting only the steamer's arrival to spread her wings and bear off this seductive sorceress to some garden of paradise in the Egean Sea.

"The owner of the yacht I had often heard of. He was a man remarkable for his enterprise and unfailing success in commerce as for his liberality, and indeed extravagance, in expenditure. He chose to have houses, pictures, horses, plate, everything of the best, was justly popular in society, and enormously rich.

"I never asked and never knew the port to which that yacht was bound. When we steamed out of the harbour she was already hull-down in the wake of a crimson sunset that seemed to stain the waters with a broad track of blood; but I saw her sold within eighteen months at Southampton, for her