SECOND PART
MY MARRIAGE
TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER
Notwithstanding my father's anxiety to leave Rome we travelled slowly and it was a week before we reached Ellan. By that time my depression had disappeared, and I was quivering with mingled curiosity and fear at the thought of meeting the man who was to be my husband.
My father, for reasons of his own, was equally excited, and as we sailed into the bay at Blackwater he pointed out the developments which had been made under his direction—the hotels, theatres, dancing palaces and boarding houses that lined the sea-front, and the electric railways that ran up to the tops of the mountains.
"See that?" he cried. "I told them I could make this old island hum."
On a great stone pier that stood deep into the bay, a crowd of people were waiting for the arrival of the steamer.
"That's nothing," said my father. "Nothing to what you see at the height of the season."
As soon as we had drawn up alongside the pier, and before the passengers had landed, four gentlemen came aboard, and my heart thumped with the thought that my intended husband would be one of them; but he was not, and the first words spoken to my father were—