Banished from Scythia, Princess Soudaroff and Nadia turned their faces southwards, and after a hurried winter journey across Central Europe and a more leisurely one through Spain, found themselves at Cadiz and on board the yacht Anna Karénina. The Princess had acted with her usual impulsiveness in deciding on the way in which she would spend her winter, and she was a little startled when she found herself in command of a ship, the crew of which, with one exception, was entirely English. She had no experience of yachting whatever, and her ignorance made her fall an easy prey to the captain, an ancient mariner endowed with as many wiles as those popularly attributed to the heathen Chinee. Like his late Majesty King George III., however, this gentleman “gloried in the name of Briton,” and considered that all foreigners were constitutionally afflicted with a more or less mild form of insanity. It was both right and advisable to humour their fancies, especially when they were sufficiently wealthy to hire a large yacht for the winter; but it was also necessary to guide them gently in the direction in which they ought to go, and to restrain their natural eccentricities by the moral influence of a stronger mind. On the very day that the Princess first came on board, the captain asserted his independence by refusing to receive his orders through the courier, a useful and important individual whom Prince Soudaroff had chosen to accompany the ladies on their travels, and protect them from extortion by the way, since if he did cheat them right and left himself he would take good care that no one else should have the opportunity of doing so. The Princess, in her kindness of heart, recognised at once that it was only natural that the captain should dislike to take orders from Alessandro, and accorded him the privilege of seeing her whenever he found it necessary, thus yielding herself as a helpless slave to a most unbending autocrat. Not that Captain Binks was rude or overbearing--far from it. The commander of a Cunarder could not have been more accommodating and urbane; but it was evident that he must know more about the winds and currents and shoals of the Mediterranean than his employer, and when some conjunction of these natural objects interfered to prevent anything that the Princess was anxious to do, it certainly could not be considered the fault of Captain Binks. This being the case, it was not, perhaps, a just punishment which overtook the old sailor when, after a short cruise in which he had regulated the ladies’ trips on shore in regular man-of-war fashion, the yacht was run into by a lumbering collier as she lay at anchor outside the Grand Harbour of Valetta on the night after arriving in sight of Malta. It had been Captain Binks’s intention to take the Anna Karénina into the harbour by daylight, thereby exhibiting to all and sundry both her beauties and his own seamanship, and then to grant the Princess the day in which to make