“What’s the use of a yacht nowadays?” Collier was saying--“what’s the use of a yacht, when you can go to sleep in a wagon-lit at the Gare du Nord, and wake up at Vladivostok? And look at the time it saves; eleven days to Gib, six to Port Said, and fifteen to Colombo--there you are, only half-way around, and you’re already sixteen days behind the man in the wagon-lit.” “But nobody wants to go to Vladivostok,” said Miss Cameron, “or anywhere else in a wagon-lit. But with a yacht you can explore out-of-the-way places, and you meet new and interesting people. We wouldn’t have met Sir Charles if we had waited for a wagon-lit.” She bowed her head to the Governor, and he smiled with gratitude. He had lost Mr. Collier somewhere in the Indian Ocean, and he was glad she had brought them back to the Windless Isles once more. “And again I repeat that the answer to that is, ‘Why not? said the March Hare,’” remarked Mr. Collier, determinedly. The answer, as an answer, did not strike Sir Charles as a very good one. But the ladies seemed to comprehend, for Miss Cameron said: “Did I tell you about meeting him at Oxford just a few months before his death--at a children’s tea-party? He was so sweet and understanding with them! Two women tried to lionize him, and he ran away and played with the children. I was more glad to meet him than any one I can think of. Not as a personage, you know, but because I felt grateful to him.” “Yes, that way, distinctly,” said Mrs. Collier. “I should have felt that way towards Mrs. Ewing more than any one else.” “I know, ‘Jackanapes,’” remarked Collier, shortly; “a brutal assault upon the feelings, I say.” “Some one else said it before you, Robert,” Mrs. Collier commented, calmly. “Perhaps Sir Charles met him at Apia.” They all turned and looked at him. He wished he could say he had met him at Apia. He did not quite see how they had made their way from a children’s tea party at Oxford to the South Pacific islands, but he was anxious to join in somewhere with a clever observation. But they never seemed to settle in one place sufficiently long for him to recollect what he knew of it. He hoped they would get around to the west coast of Africa in time. He had been Governor of Sierra Leone for five years. His success that night at dinner on the yacht was far better. The others seemed a little tired after the hours of sight-seeing to which he had treated them, and they were content to listen. In the absence of Mr. Clarges, who knew them word by word, he felt free to tell his three stories of life at Sierra Leone. He took his time in the telling, and could congratulate himself that his efforts had never been more keenly appreciated. He felt that he was holding his own.