"
"I thought that that was what you were thinking about," said the
ingenuous Tinker.
"If you add thought-reading to your other accomplishments, it will be
too much," said Sir Tancred with conviction.
Of a sudden there came bustling round the right-hand horn of the bay a
most disreputable, bedraggled-looking vessel. By her lines a yacht,
her decks would have been a disgrace to the oldest and most battered
tin-pot of an ocean tramp. Her masts had gone, there were gaps in her
bulwarks, and the smoke of her furnaces, pouring through a hole in her
deck over which her funnel had once reared itself, had taken advantage
of this rare and golden opportunity to blacken her after-part to a very
fair semblance of imitation ebony, and to transform her crew to an even
fairer imitation of negroes dressed in black.
"She is in a mess!" said Tinker.
"Of the Atlantic's making, to judge by its completeness," said Sir
Tancred. "Whose yacht is it?"
"I don't know," said Tinker, staring at it with all his eyes.
"You ought to," said Sir Tancred with some severity. "You've been on
it. It's Meyer's."
"So it is," said Tinker, mortified. "I am stupid not to have
recognised it!"
"Your new clairvoyant faculty must be weakening your power of
observation.
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