his lips and cheeks.

"A ship, Herr Kapitan?" he asked in a thin, reedy voice, and reached
for a pair of long-toed, elastic-sided boots that he had kicked off,
and which lay at the foot of his bunk.

His superior officer nodded and snapped out a string of guttural
orders. The sing-song voices of men at their stations amid the levers
and dials repeated the words mechanically, like men talking in their
sleep. With a whizzing, purring sound the motors started, and the
ballast tanks filled with a succession of sucking gurgles.

Von Sperrgebiet glanced at the compass and moved to the eye-piece of
the periscope. For a while there was silence, broken only by the hum
of the motors.

The Second-in-Command hung about the elbow of the motionless figure at
the periscope like a morbid-minded urchin on the outskirts of a crowd
that gathers round a street accident, but can see nothing. His stolid
face was working and moist with excitement.

"Is it an English ship, Herr Kapitan?"

The Oberleutnant made no answer, but reached out a hand to the wheel
that adjusted the height of the periscope above the water and twisted
it rapidly. For twenty minutes he remained thus, motionless save for
the arm that controlled the periscope. Once or twice he gave a
low-voiced direction to the helmsman, but his Second-in-Command he
ignored completely.

That officer moved restlessly about the Submarine, glancing from dial
to dial and from one gauge to another; for a few minutes he stopped to
talk to the torpedo-man standing by the closed tube. Finally he
returned to his Captain's elbow, moistening his marred lip with the tip
of his tongue; his face wore an unhealthy pallor and glistened in the
glow of the electric lights.

"Is it an English ship, Herr Kapitan?" he asked again in his high,
unnatural voice.

"Yes," snapped von Sperrgebiet. "Why?"

"I have a request to make," replied the Second-in-Command. "A favour,
Herr Kapitan. It concerns a promise"--he lowered his voice till it was
barely audible above the noise of the machinery--"to my betrothed."

For the first time von Sperrgebiet turned his face from the rubber
eye-piece and regarded the youth with a little mocking smile that
showed only a sharp dog-tooth.

"Don't say you promised to introduce her to me, Ludwig!" he sneered.

"No, no," said the other hastily. "But she made me promise not to
return to her unless I had sunk with my own hands a merchant ship
flying the cursed