by the most interesting phenomena and I'm
really bored. I've taken to heart all your advice and I'm really bored.
So there!"

The agreeable, untidy, unprofessional Portuguese quack twinkled at him,
and then said in his thick, southern, highly un-English voice: "The
remedy may be worse than the disease. You are bored because you have no
worries, my friend. I will give you advice. Go back to your Treasury."

"I cannot," said Mr. Prohack. "I've resigned. I found out that my friend
Hunter was expecting promotion in my place."

"Ah, well!" replied Dr. Veiga with strange sardonic indifference. "If
you will sacrifice yourself to your friends you must take the
consequences like a man. I will talk to you some other time, when I've
got nothing better to do. I am very busy, telling people what they
already know." And he went.

A minute later Charlie arrived in a car suitable to his grandeur.

"Look here, dad," said Charlie in a hurry. "If you're game for a day out
I particularly want to show you something. And incidentally you'll see
some driving, believe me!"

"My will is made! I am game," answered Mr. Prohack, delighted at the
prospect of any diversion, however perilous.

II

When Charlie drew up at the Royal Pier, Southampton (having reached
there in rather less time than the train journey and a taxi at each end
would have required), he silently handed over the wheel to the
chauffeur, and led his mystified but unenquiring father down the steps
on the west side of the pier. A man in a blue suit with a peaked cap and
a white cover on the cap was standing at the foot of the steps, just
above the water and above a motor-launch containing two other men in
blue jerseys with the name "Northwind" on their breasts and on their
foreheads. A blue ensign was flying at the stem of the launch.

"How d'ye do, Snow?" Charlie greeted the first man, who raised his cap.

Father and son got into the launch and the man after them: the launch
began to snort, and off it went at a racing speed from the pier towards
midchannel. Mr. Prohack, who said not a word, perceived a string of
vessels of various sizes which he judged to be private yachts, though he
had no experience whatever of yachts. Some of them flew bunting and some
of them didn't; but they all without exception appeared, as Mr. Prohack
would have expected, to be the very symbols of complicated elegance and
luxury, shining and glittering buoyantly there on the brilliant blue