“Nothing; only Barclay Wendover’s yacht is still there.  There’s been a hitch of some sort.  They were to have left yesterday.”

“Is that it—­that long black thing?” queried Theron.  “That can’t be a yacht, can it?”

“What do you think it is?” answered the other.  They were looking at a slim, narrow hull, lying at anchor, silent and motionless on the drab expanse of water.  “If that ain’t a yacht, they haven’t begun building any yet.  They’re taking her over to the Mediterranean for a cruise, you know—­around India and Japan for the winter, and home by the South Sea islands.  Friend o’ mine’s in the party.  Wouldn’t mind the trip myself.”

“But do you mean to say,” asked Theron, “that that little shell of a thing can sail across the ocean?  Why, how many people would she hold?”

The man laughed.  “Well,” he said, “there’s room for two sets of quadrilles in the chief saloon, if the rest keep their legs well up on the sofas.  But there’s only ten or a dozen in the party this time.  More than that rather get in one another’s way, especially with so many ladies on board.”

Theron asked no more questions, but bent his head to see the last of this wonderful craft.  The sight of it, and what he had heard about it, suddenly gave point and focus to his thoughts.  He knew at last what it was that had lurked, formless and undesignated, these many days in the background of his dreams.  The picture rose in his mind now of Celia as the mistress of a yacht.  He could see her reclining in a low easy-chair upon the polished deck, with the big white sails billowing behind her, and the sun shining upon the deep blue waves, and glistening through the splash of spray in the air, and weaving a halo of glowing gold about her fair head.  Ah, how the tender visions crowded now upon him!  Eternal summer basked round this enchanted yacht of his fancy—­summer sought now in Scottish firths or Norwegian fiords, now in quaint old Southern harbors, ablaze with the hues of strange costumes and half-tropical flowers and fruits, now in far-away Oriental bays and lagoons, or among the coral reefs and palm-trees of the luxurious Pacific.  He dwelt upon these new imaginings with the fervent longing of an inland-born boy.  Every vague yearning he had ever felt toward salt-water stirred again in his blood at the thought of the sea—­with Celia.

Why not?  She had never visited any foreign land.  “Sometime,” she had said, “sometime, no doubt I will.”  He could hear again the wistful, musing tone of her voice.  The thought had fascinations for her, it was clear.  How irresistibly would it not appeal to her, presented with the added charm of a roving, vagrant independence on the high seas, free to speed in her snow-winged chariot wherever she willed over the deep, loitering in this place, or up-helm-and-away to another, with no more care or weight of responsibility than the gulls tossing through the air in her wake!