Then Dacre essayed a cheerier note. "We can't help dwelling on these things," he said; "but I would remind you that you are still a young man, and it is a nice question, whether, when all is said and done, you are justified in binding yourself forever to a pale ghost. It is a poetic conceit; but the eugenist would tell you that you ought to marry." "I shall never marry," said Power. Nancy's secret would be buried with him, and that fact alone burked any reference to Marguerite Sinclair. Dacre was exceedingly shrewd, and could hardly fail to reach the correct conclusion if he heard that "the other woman" did actually exist, and that circumstances of recent discovery alone prevented the contemplated marriage. "Ah, well!" sighed the older man, relapsing into Power's mood. "This is a genuine instance of the pot advising the kettle not to be black. How do you purpose spending your time?" "I'll tell you. I mean to do some good in the world. But I have not come here to bore you with humane projects. I've not forgotten that you are a yachtsman. Say you agree, and I'll hire a yacht to take us up the west coast of Scotland and across the North Sea to the fiords." "Spoken like a prince! It is the very thing I'm longing for; but my purse won't run to it, and I'm rather too old to fraternize with Cockney excursionists on David MacBrayne's steamers or Cook's tourists in Norway." So the friends passed an enjoyable summer, and liked the yacht so well that they cruised south by way of Holland, Belgium, and France, and wintered in the Mediterranean. Then Power and his secretary hied them to Bison again; whence their next journey headed east. They visited flower-laden Honolulu, panting Japan, gray China, and golden India. Pitching his tent where he listed, Power saw mankind in the mass. Everywhere, even in climes where Nature is prodigal of her gifts, there was misery to be softened, suffering to be alleviated, men and women in want and worthy of help. His methods were simple in the extreme. Attracting little or no attention by display of wealth, he and Howard studied every problem that seemed to call for solution by money wisely applied. At the last moment--often when he had departed to some far distant place--Power would send the needed sum to the right quarter. Thus, remaining almost unknown, he left a trail of well-doing behind him in the four corners of the globe. Sometimes, when the written or printed word insisted on making him famous, if Bison was too remote a sanctuary, he would disappear for many months on end, either hobnobbing with Dacre in Devonshire or elsewhere, or taking protracted tours in out-of-the-way countries like East Africa, Siberia, or the Balkans. Naturally, he had adventures and misadventures. No man can scour the earth, year in and year out--be he rich as Croesus or kindly as Francis d'Assisi--without enduring vicissitudes, whether they arise from the haphazard casualties of travel or are the outcome of sheer human perversity.