The Gilded Chair by Melville Davisson Post

When the Duke of Dorset came into the hotel dining room at ten o'clock for breakfast, he met a hall boy, calling his name and "letter please," after the manner of the English hostelry. He sat down at a table, thrust a knife under the flap of the letter and ripped it open. He took out the folded paper within and bent it back across his fingers. The paper was an outline map of the Pacific Coast of the United States. Merely a tracing like those maps used commonly on liners to indicate the day's run. It was marked with a cross in ink, at a point off the coast of Oregon, and signed across the bottom "Caroline Childers."

The Duke arose and went over to the window. The white yacht, lying last night at anchor, was going now out of the bay of Oban, the smoke pouring from her stacks. The gulls attended her, the sun danced on her painted flanks, and the green water, boiling under lace, ran hissing in two furrows, spreading like a V from her screw. The Duke remained standing in the window, his shoulders thrown loosely forward, his hand clenched and resting on the sill, the open map in his fingers. The yacht saluted the warship, dipping her colors, and turned westward slowly into the channel. Her proportions descended gradually into miniature. The smoke crawled lazily in thinner whisps along the sky landward from her funnels. The sea was a pot of molten glass, green as verdigris far down under the light, and polished on the surface like a crystal. Over this water, easily, without a sound, without the swinging of a davit, the yacht moved out slowly to the sea like something crawling on a mirror.