de) a scene with the step-mother,
the memory of which rankles in me yet. After all, she was a sensible
woman.

As for the other two, the girl when I saw her next, in her short
boating skirt and tam-o'-shanter, was a miracle of coolness and
pluck. But for her I should never have got him away. And ah! how good
it was to be out in the wholesome rain again, hurrying to the harbour
with my two charges, hurrying them down the greasy ladder to that
frail atom of English soil, their first guerdon of home and safety.

Our flight from the harbour was unmolested, unnoticed. Only the first
ghastly evidences of dawn were mingling with the strangled moonlight,
as we tacked round the pier-head and headed close-reefed down the
Riff-Gat on the lees of the ebb-tide. We had to pass under the very
quarter of the Blitz, so Davies said; for, of course, he alone was on
deck till we reached the open sea. Day was breaking then. It was dead
low water, and, far away to the south, between dun swathes of sand, I
thought I saw--but probably it was only a fancy--two black stranded
specks. Rail awash, and decks streaming, we took the outer swell and
clawed close-hauled under the lee of Juist, westward, hurrying
westward.

'Up the Ems on the flood, and to Dutch Delfzyl,' I urged. No, thought
Davies; it was too near Germany, and there was a tidal cut through
from Buse Tief. Better to dodge in behind Rottum Island. So on we
pressed, past Memmert, over the Juister Reef and the Corinne's buried
millions, across the two broad and yeasty mouths of the Ems, till
Rottum, a wee lonesome wafer of an islet, the first of the Dutch
archipelago, was close on the weather-bow.

'We must get in behind that,' said Davies, 'then we shall be safe; I
think I know the way, but get the next chart; and then take a rest,
old chap. Clara and I can manage.' (She had been on deck most of the
time, as capable a hand as you could wish for, better far than I in
my present state of exhaustion.) I crawled along the slippery sloping
planks and went below.

'Where are we?' cried Dollmann, starting up from the lee sofa, where
he seemed to have been lying in a sort of trance. A book, his own
book, slipped from his knees, and I saw the frontispiece lying on the
floor in a pool of oil; for the stove had gone adrift, and the saloon
was in a wretched state of squalor and litter.

'Off Rottum,' I said, and knelt up to find the chart. There was a
look in his eyes that I suppose I ought