On this afternoon, while the _Jenny_ sailed toward Genoa, he was at his post on the bridge, in his gold braided hat, glass in hand, his maps open before him, and he directed the course with an attention as complete and scrupulous as though he had been occupied all his life in giving orders to sailors. He had to a supreme degree that trait common to all great workers,--the capacity for giving himself always and wholly to the occupation of the moment. And to him the vast sea, so blue and soft, whose calm surface scarcely rippled, was but a racecourse upon which to exercise his love of contest, of struggle, the one pleasure of the Anglo-Saxon. Five hundred yards to the right, ahead of the _Jenny_, was a low, black yacht, with a narrower hull, steaming at full speed. It was the _Dalilah_, of Lord Herbert Bohun. Farther ahead, on the left, another yacht was sailing in the same direction. This one was white, like the _Jenny_, but with a wider beam. It was the _Albatross_, the favorite plaything of the Grand Dukes of Russia. The American had allowed these two yachts to leave Cannes some time before him, with the intention, quickly perceived by the others, of passing them, and immediately, as it were, a tacit wager was made by the Russian prince, the English lord, and the American millionaire, all three equally fanatical of sport, each as proud of his boat as a young man of his horses or his mistress. To Dickie Marsh, as he stood with his glass in his hand, giving orders to the men, the whole scene reduced itself to a triangle, whose corners were marked by the three yachts. He was literally blind to the admirable horizon that stretched before him; the violet Esterel, with the long, undulating line of its mountains, its dark ravines and jagged promontories, the port of Cannes and the mole, with the old town and the church rising behind it, all bathed in an atmosphere so transparent that one could distinguish every little window and its shutters, every tree behind the walls, the luxuriant hills of Grasse in the background, and along the bay the line of white villas set in their gardens; then the islands, like two oases of dark green, and suddenly the curve of another gulf, terminated by the solitary point of the Antibes. And the trees on this point, like those of the islands, bouquets of parasol pines, all bent in one direction, spoke of the eternal drama of this shore, the war of the mistral and the waves. But now the drama was suspended, giving place to the most intoxicating flood of light. Not a fleck of foam marred the immense sweep of liquid sapphire over which the Jenny advanced with a sonorous and fresh sound of divided water. Not one of those flaky clouds, which sailors call cattails, lined the radiant dome of the sky where the sun appeared to expand, dilate, rejoice in ether absolutely pure. It seemed as though this sky and sea and shore had conspired to fulfil the prophecy of the chiromancer, Corancez, upon the