God above me, we will never rest until we have found them.” He could not reply to me. I summoned Okyada, and bade him find a bedroom for Mr. Harry Avenhill. “We leave by the early train for Newcastle,” I said. “See that Mr. Avenhill is called in time. And please to tell my sister that I am coming to have a long talk with her.” My poor sister! However will she live if there are no slippers to be aired or man’s untidiness to be corrected! Her love for me is very sweet and true. I could wish almost that my duty would leave me here in England to enjoy it. CHAPTER VI. A CHALLENGE FROM A WOMAN. Dr. Fabos joins his Yacht “White Wings.” Dr. Fabos joins his Yacht “White Wings.” I had given the name of White Wings to my new turbine yacht, and this, I confess, provokes the merriment of mariners both ancient and youthful. We are painted a dirty grey, and have the true torpedo bows—to say nothing of our low-lying stern rounded like a shark’s back and just as formidable to look upon when we begin to make our twenty-five knots. The ship is entirely one after my own heart. I will not deny that an ambition of mastery has affected me from my earliest days. My castles must be impregnable, be they upon the sea or ashore. And the yacht which Yarrow built for me has no superior upon any ocean. White Wings The boat, I say, was built upon the Thames and engined upon the Tyne. I remember that I ordered it three days after I wrote the word “ship” in my diary; upon a morning when the notion first came to me that the sea and not the land harboured the world’s great criminals, and that upon the sea alone would they be taken. To none other than the pages of my diary may I reveal this premonition yet awhile. The police would mock it; the public remain incredulous. And so I keep my secret, and I carry it with me. God knows to what haven. We left Newcastle, bravely enough, upon the second day of September in the year 1904. A member of the Royal Yacht Squadron by favour and friendship of the late Prince Valikoff, of Moscow, whose daughter’s life he declared that I saved, we flew the White Ensign, and were named, I do not doubt, for a Government ship. Few would have guessed that this was the private yacht of an eccentric Englishman; that he had embarked upon one
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