Frank could not; but Priscilla's tone comforted him a little. Yet his
conscience was ill at ease.

"But Miss Lentaigne," he said, "your Aunt Juliet----"

"She'll object, all right, of course," said Priscilla. "If she knew
where we are this minute she'd be dead, cock sure that we'd be drowned.
She'd probably spend the afternoon planning out nice warm ways of
wrapping up our clammy corpses when she got them back. But she doesn't
know, so that's all right."

"She will know, this evening. We shall have to tell her."

On one point Frank was entirely decided. Priscilla should neither
lure nor drive him into any kind of deceit about the expedition. But
Priscilla had no such intention.

"We'll tell her right enough," she said, "when we get home. She'll be
pretty mad, of course, inwardly; but she can't _say_ much on account of
her principles."

"I don't see what her principles have to do with it."

"Don't you? Then you must be rather stupid. Can't you see that if you
haven't really got a sprained ankle, but only believe you have, and
wouldn't have it if you believed you hadn't, then we shouldn't really be
drowned, supposing we were drowned, I mean, which, of course, we're not
going to be--if we believed we weren't drowned? And Aunt Juliet, with her
principles, would be bound to believe we weren't, even if we were.
We've only got to put it to her that way and she won't have a ghost of a
grievance left. It's the simplest form of Christian Science. But in
any case, whatever silliness Aunt Juliet may indulge in, we were simply
bound to have the _Tortoise_ today. It's a matter of duty. I don't see
how you can get around that, Cousin Frank, no matter how you argue."

Frank did not want to get behind his duty. He had been brought up with a
very high regard for the word, If it had been clearly shown him that it
was his duty to take an ocean voyage in the _Tortoise_, with Priscilla
as leader of the expedition, he would have bidden a long farewell to
his friends and gone forth cheerfully. But he did not see that this
particular sail, which seemed, indeed, little better than a humiliating,
though agreeable, act of truancy, could possibly be sheltered under the
name of duty. Priscilla enlightened him.

"I daresay you don't know," she said, "that there is a German spy at the
present moment making a chart of this bay. We are hunting him."

There is something intensely stimulating to every healthy mind in the
idea of hunting a spy.