f our
company with their wives and a good many reporters having crammed
themselves into the big saloon carriage reserved for me.

At the last moment somebody threw a sheaf of evening papers through my
window, and as soon as we were well away I took up one of them and tried
to read it, but column after column fell blank on my eyes, for my mind
was full of other matters.

The talk in the carriage, too, did not interest me in the least. It was
about the big, hustling, resonant world, general elections, the fall of
ministries, Acts of Parliament, and the Lord knows what--things that had
looked important when we were in the dumb solitude of Winter Quarters,
but seemed to be of no account now when I was hungering for something
else.

At last I got a quiet pressman in a corner and questioned him about
Ellan.

"That's my native island, you know--anything going on there?"

The reporter said yes, there was some commotion about the failure of
banks, with the whole island under a cloud, and its biggest financial
man gone smash.

"Is his name O'Neill?" I asked.

"That's it."

"Anything else happened there while I've been away?"

"No . . . yes . . . well, now that I think of it, there was a big scare
a year or so ago about a young peeress who disappeared mysteriously."

"Was . . . was it Lady Raa?"

"Yes," said the reporter, and then (controlling myself as well as I
could) I listened to a rapid version of what had become known about my
dear one down to the moment when she "vanished as utterly as if she had
been dropped into the middle of the Irish Sea."

It is of no use saying what I felt after that, except that flying in an
express train to London, I was as impatient of space and time as if I
had been in a ship down south stuck fast in the rigid besetment of the
ice.

I could not talk, and I dared not think, so I shouted for a sing-song,
and my shipmates (who had been a little low at seeing me so silent)
jumped at the proposal like schoolboys let loose from school.

Of course O'Sullivan gave us "The Minsthrel Boy"; and Treacle sang "Yew
are the enny"; and then I, yes I (Oh, God!), sang "Sally's the gel," and
every man of my company joined in the ridiculous chorus.

Towards ten o'clock we changed lines on the loop at Waterloo and ran
into Charing Cross, where we found another and still bigger crowd of
hearty people behind a barrier, with a group of my committee, my fellow
explorers, and geographers in general, wai