led Joe--cadet at Dartmouth."

"Did you ever ask him to dinner--before you were engaged, I mean?"
pursued the inquisitor.

The India-rubber Man laughed.

"Well, not dinner exactly. But I went down to Osborne College once and
stood him a blow-out at the tuck-shop."

His companion nodded darkly in the direction of the King's Messenger.

"Shouldn't wonder if Thorogood was feeling like that lad Joe. Useful
fellow to travel with, Thorogood."

[1] Submarine.

CHAPTER III

ULTIMA THULE

Across the stormy North Sea came the first faint streak of dawn. It
overtook a long line of Destroyers rolling landward with battered
bridge-screens and salt-crusted funnels; it met a flotilla of
mine-sweeping Sloops, labouring patiently out to their unending task. It
lit the frowning cliffs, round which wind-tossed gulls wailed and
breakers had thundered the beat of an ocean's pulse throughout the ages.

The Destroyers were not sorry to see the dawn. The night was their
task-master: in darkness they worked and in the Shadow of Death. They
passed within hailing distance of the Sloops, and on board the reeling
Destroyers here and there a figure in streaming oilskins raised his arm
and waved a salutation to the squat grey craft setting forth in the
comfortless dawn to holystone Death's doorstep.

The Mine-sweepers refrained from any such amenity. Anon the darkness
would come again, when no man may sweep for mines. Then would be their
turn for grins and the waving of arms. In the meanwhile, they preferred
to remain grim and restless as their work.

Presently the Destroyers, obedient to a knotted tangle of flags at the
yardarm of their leader, altered course a little; they were making for an
opening in the wall of rock, on either side of which gaunt promontories
thrust their naked shoulders into the surf. The long black, viperish
hulls passed through under the ever-watchful eyes of the shore batteries,
and the hooded figures on the Destroyer bridges threw back their duffle
cowls and wiped the night's accumulation of dried spray and cinders out
of the puckers round their tired eyes.

The Commanding Officer of the leading Destroyer leaned across the
bridge-rails and stared round at the ring of barren islands encircling
the great expanse of water into which they had passed, the naked,
snow-powdered hills in the background: at the greyness and desolation of
earth and sky and sea.

"Home again!" he said in an undert