t of so expansive an oracle. It was I who elicited most of
the practical information--details of time, weather, and likely
places for shooting, with some shrewd hints as to the kind of people
to conciliate. Whatever he thought of me, I warmed with sympathy
towards the pilot, for he assumed that we had done with cruising for
the year, and thought us mad enough as it was to have been afloat so
long, and madder still to intend living on 'so little a ship' when we
could live on land with beer and music handy. I was tempted to raise
the North Sea question, just to watch Davies under the thunder of
rebukes which would follow. But I refrained from a wish to be tender
with him, now that all was going so well. The Frisian Islands were an
extravagant absurdity now. I did not even refer to them as we pulled
back to the 'Dulcibella', after swearing eternal friendship with the
good pilot and his family.

Davies and I turned in good friends that night--or rather I should
say that I turned in, for I left him sucking an empty pipe and
aimlessly fingering a volume of Mahan; and once when I woke in the
night I felt somehow that his bunk was empty and that he was there in
the dark cabin, dreaming.

VII. The Missing Page

I WOKE (on 1st October) with that dispiriting sensation that a hitch
has occurred in a settled plan. It was explained when I went on deck,
and I found the 'Dulcibella' wrapped in a fog, silent, clammy, nothing
visible from her decks but the ghostly hull of a galliot at anchor
near us. She must have brought up there in the night, for there had
been nothing so close the evening before; and I remembered that my
sleep had been broken once by sounds of rumbling chain and gruff
voices.

'This looks pretty hopeless for to-day,' I said, with a shiver, to
Davies, who was laying the breakfast.

'Well, we can't do anything till this fog lifts,' he answered, with a
good deal of resignation. Breakfast was a cheerless meal. The damp
penetrated to the very cabin, whose roof and walls wept a fine dew. I
had dreaded a bathe, and yet missed it, and the ghastly light made
the tablecloth look dirtier than it naturally was, and all the
accessories more sordid. Something had gone wrong with the bacon, and
the lack of egg-cups was not in the least humorous.

Davies was just beginning, in his summary way, to tumble the things
together for washing up, when there was a sound of a step on deck,
two sea-boots appeared on the ladder,