“To be short, he sailed back for Corsica in a well-found ship, with cannon and ammunition on board, and some specie—­the whole cargo worth between twenty and thirty thousand pounds.  He made a landing at Tavagna and threw in almost all his warlike stores.  His wife hurried to meet him:  but after a week, finding that the French were pouring troops into the island, and becoming (they tell me) suddenly nervous of the price on his head, he sailed away almost without warning.  They say also that on the passage he murdered the man whom his creditors had forced him to take as supercargo, sold the vessel at Leghorn, and made off with the specie—­no penny of which had reached his queen or his poor subjects.  She—­sad childless soul—­ driven with her chiefs and counsellors into the mountains before the combined French and Genoese, escaped a year later to Tuscany, and hid herself with her sorrows in a religious house ten miles from Florence.

“So ended this brief reign:  and you, Prosper, have met the chief actor in it.  A very few words will tell the rest.  The French overran the island until ’41, when the business of the Austrian succession forced them to withdraw their troops and leave the Genoese once more face to face with the islanders.  Promptly these rose again.  Giafferi and Hyacinth Paoli had fled to Naples; Hyacinth with two sons, Pascal and Clement, whom he trained there (as I am told) in all the liberal arts and in undying hatred of the Genoese.  These two lads, returning to the island, took up their father’s fight and have maintained it, with fair success as I learn.  From parts of the island they must have completely extruded the enemy for a while; since my lady made bold, four years ago, to settle these visitors of ours in her palace above the Taravo.  It would appear, however, that the Genoese have gathered head again, and his business with them may explain why Pascal Paoli has not answered the letter I addressed to him, these eight months since, notifying my son’s claim upon the succession.  Or he may have reckoned it indecent of me to address him in lieu of his Queen, who had returned to the island.  I had not heard of her return.  I heard of it to-day for the first time, and of her peril, which shall hurry us ten times faster than our pretensions.  Prosper,” my father concluded, “we must invade Corsica, and at once.”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed my uncle.  “How!”

“In a ship,” my father answered him as simply.  “How otherwise?”

Said my uncle, “But where is your ship?”

Answered my father, “If you will but step outside and pick up one of these fir-cones in the grass, you can almost toss it on to her deck.  She is called the Gauntlet, and her skipper is Captain Jo Pomery.  I might have racked my brain for a month to find such a skipper or a ship so well found and happily named as this which Providence has brought to my door.  I attach particular importance to the name of a ship.”