was due to my prolonged study of the Italian Renaissance, a period to which I had kept my reading for a number of years. I remember giving up my ticket to a sleek-haired, frock-coated individual, and passing along a corridor hung with black velvet, against which were hung one or two large canvases in formidable gold frames, cunningly illuminated by concealed electric globes. A haughty creature stood by a table loaded with catalogues and deigned to accept my shilling. And then, feeling strange and gauche, as is only felt by the sea-farer ashore when he steps out of his authentic milieu, I passed through into the gallery, a high, dignified chamber full of the quiet radiance of beautiful pictures, the life-work of a man whom I had known. I found myself regretting that fate had not permitted me to remain in such an environment; but one cannot avoid one's destiny, and mine is to have an essentially middle-class mind, a bourgeois mentality, which makes it impossible for me to live among artists or people of culture for any length of time. I should say that the reason for this is that such folk are not primarily interested in persons but in types and ideas, whereas I am for persons. Flowers and trees, perfumes and music, colours and children, are to me irrelevant. But every man and woman I meet is to me a fresh problem which engages my emotions. The talk about types is incomprehensible to me, for each fresh individual will throw me into a trance of speculation. But only when one has lived among clever people can one realize how tedious and monotonous their society can be. I was thinking about the man who had painted these pictures and how he had delighted to frighten me with his obscene comments about women, when I saw a woman far down on the left, a woman in an enormous hat, holding extravagant furs about her thin form, and talking to a tall, handsome man from between her small white teeth.

For you will not be too much astonished to hear that this girl for whom I had cherished this sterile fidelity had become in all essentials the dream-woman who had been the bane of my life for so long. Perhaps she had always been the same and the illusion of youth had blinded me to her identity. Perhaps, on the other hand, she had really changed, for she was now twenty-five instead of twenty-one—ominous years in a woman's life. At any rate, I had changed for a certainty. While I still struggled against the bondage her personality imposed upon me, I no longer struggled in vain. I had been drawing stores of strength from toil, from the sea, from the bizarre phantasmagoria which the countries of the East had unrolled before my eyes. And I think she saw this at once, for she had no sooner introduced me to her companion, an actor who had recently married an eminent actress twice his own age, than she made our excuses and proposed an immediate departure.

But it was too late. As we drove in a swiftly moving taxi-cab through the gay streets of West London, and on out to Richmond, where she was staying with friends, I knew that in the end I should be free. She was soon to be married, and in her satirical gray eyes I saw a desire to hold me permanently in a condition of chivalrous abnegation. On these terms I might achieve some sort of destiny without endangering her dominion. But I felt the winds of freedom blowing from the future on my face. I did not see then how it would come about: I did not even imagine the long years of moody and unprofitable voyaging which lay before me. But she saw that her own ideal of masculine modern womanhood no longer appeared to me the supremely evocative thing she claimed it to be, so that in time, in time, her power would depart. I can see her now, turned slightly away from me in the cab, regarding me over her shoulder from beneath that enormous hat, studying even then how she could keep me true to that worn-out creed, weighing who knows what reckless plans in her cool, clever brain....

But it was a long time! For years yet I saw her before me whenever I thought of other women, and her disparaging, slightly satirical smile would interpose itself and hold me back from experimenting with fresh emotions. Even when war came and our spiritual and emotional worlds came crashing about our ears, her power waned but did not depart. I had no choice between this shadowy, reluctant fidelity and a descent into regions where I had neither the means nor the temperament to prosper. And so it went, until suddenly one day the whole thing came to an end. You will remember how I abruptly abandoned the story upon which I was engaged, and told you I had begun upon a tale you had told to me, the tale of Captain Macedoine's Daughter? Behold it, transmuted into something you would never recognize, as is the way of stories when a novelist of romantic tendencies gets at them! And what I want you to observe is that the inspiration, as far as I am concerned, was based upon your brief yet intensely vivid projection of your life in that dull street in a Saloniki faubourg, a street so like many of ours in the faubourgs of London, stretching away into dim, dusty distances; but unlike ours in that beyond it rose ranges of hard, sharp mountains that looked as though they had been cut out of pasteboard, and stuck against a sky so unreal in its uncompromising blueness that it seemed to be aniline-dyed. And as the days passed, and the story grew, here by the blue waters of the Gulf I suddenly realized that the spell of the dream-woman had been broken, that behind my story of Captain Macedoine's Daughter another story was working out—the ghost of a story if you like—the drama of the end of an illusion. My old antagonist had met her match at last. She tried to frighten me with her slightly satirical smile. She invoked the innumerable memories and sentiments in which I had been born and reared. But she had met her match. I took her by the arm and opening the door, thrust her gently outside. And then, while you were down there in the garden, I went on to write the tale of Captain Macedoine's Daughter.

There is another long-drawn shriek—the train is leaving the station next to ours—and I take a last look out upon the well-remembered view. Across the shining waters of the Gulf the lights of the city are glittering already against the many-coloured façades, with their marble and cedar balconies, their bright green jalousies and gay ensigns. Already the war-ships in the rade are picked out in bright points, and the mast-head lights are winking rapid messages to each other. The western sky over the headland is a smoky orange with pale green and amber above, and the moon, an incredibly slender crescent of pure silver, hangs faintly over Mount Pagos. It is quite dark down under the cypresses, and a smell of humid earth mingles with the perfume of the jasmine.

Yes, I am now quite ready. No, I have left nothing behind, except perhaps....

Well, it is for you to say.

CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER

CHAPTER I

None of the men sitting in deck chairs under the awning were surprised to hear the Chief say that he had known Ipsilon in peace-time. So far H. M. S. Sycorax had touched at no port, and patrolled no sea-route which that quiet and occasionally garrulous man had not known in peace-time. This was not surprising, as we have said, for he alone had been a genuine wanderer upon the face of the waters. The Commander, who lived in majestic seclusion in his own suite, had been all his life in the Pacific trade. The First, Second, and Third Lieutenants came out of western ocean liners. The Surgeon and Paymaster were "temporary" and only waited the last shot to return to the comfortable sinecures, which they averred awaited them in London and Edinburgh. So it happened that to the Chief alone the eastern