n he
abandoned me.

It was eleven before we left this hospitable inn, escorted by the
whole party to the dinghy. Our friends of the smack insisted on our
sharing their boat out of pure good-fellowship--for there was not
nearly room for us--and would not let us go till a bucket of
fresh-caught fish had been emptied into her bottom. After much
shaking of scaly hands, we sculled back to the 'Dulcibella', where she
slept in a bed of tremulous stars.

Davies sniffed the wind and scanned the tree-tops, where light gusts
were toying with the leaves.

'Sou'-west still,' he said, 'and more rain coming. But it's bound to
shift into the north.'

'Will that be a good wind for us?'

'It depends where we go,' he said, slowly. 'I was asking those
fellows about duck-shooting. They seemed to think the best place
would be Schlei Fiord. That's about fifteen miles south of
Sonderburg, on the way to Kiel. They said there was a pilot chap
living at the mouth who would tell us all about it. They weren't very
encouraging though. We should want a north wind for that.'

'I don't care where we go,' I said, to my own surprise.

'Don't you really?' he rejoined, with sudden warmth. Then, with a
slight change of voice. 'You mean it's all very jolly about here?'

Of course I meant that. Before we went below we both looked for a
moment at the little grey memorial; its slender fretted arch outlined
in tender lights and darks above the hollow on the Alsen shore. The
night was that of 27th September, the third I had spent on the
'Dulcibella'.

VI. Schlei Fiord

I MAKE no apology for having described these early days in some
detail. It is no wonder that their trivialities are as vividly before
me as the colours of earth and sea in this enchanting corner of the
world. For every trifle, sordid or picturesque, was relevant; every
scrap of talk a link; every passing mood critical for good or ill. So
slight indeed were the determining causes that changed my autumn
holiday into an undertaking the most momentous I have ever
approached.

Two days more preceded the change. On the first, the southwesterly
wind still holding, we sallied forth into Augustenburg Fiord, 'to
practise smartness in a heavy thresh,' as Davies put it. It was the
day of dedication for those disgusting oilskins, immured in whose
stiff and odorous angles, I felt distressfully cumbersome; a day of
proof indeed for me, for heavy squalls swept incessantly over the
loch, an