a vision of an angry taxi-driver, another man
pointing to the roadway, as if the blame lay there, whilst the
passenger from the taxi was running towards the Florence Nightingale
statue shouting and waving his arms at the vehicles passing along Pall
Mall.

Slowly Dorothy turned and pursued her way up Regent Street. She was
tired and--and, oh! it was so stupid, going on living.

That night as she was undressing she remembered the passenger from the
second taxi. Why had he been so interested in the taxi that was
bearing John Dene away, and why had he tried to signal to other
vehicles passing along Pall Mall? He had seemed greatly excited.
Above all, why had John Dene taken a taxi when he had been warned
against it?

CHAPTER XII

THE _DESTROYER_ READY FOR SEA

James Blake stood in the bows of the _Toronto_ gazing down at the long,
cigar-shaped object that lay like a huge grey cocoon reposing in her
bowels. The morrow would see the _Destroyer_ floated out to carry her
three hundred odd feet of menace into the blues and greys of the ocean.

Blake was a man upon whom silence had descended as a blight; heavy of
build, slow of thought, ponderous of movement, he absorbed all and
apparently gave out nothing. His most acute emotion he expressed by
fingering the right-hand side of his ragged beard, whilst his eyes
seemed to smoulder as his thoughts slowly took shape.

As he gazed down at the grey shape of the _Destroyer's_ hull, there was
in his eyes a strange look of absorption. For nearly two years he had
lived for the _Destroyer_. It had been wife and family to him, home
and holiday, labour and recreation, food and drink. Nothing else
mattered, because nothing else was. The war existed only in so far as
it was concerned with the _Destroyer_. It was the _mise en scene_ for
this wonder-boat. It was to be her setting, just as a stage is the
setting for a play.

As he gazed down at her, he fumbled in the pocket of his pilot-jacket
and drew forth a cigar, one of a box that John Dene had sent him.
Slowly and deliberately he pulled out his jack-knife, cut off the end
and, taking a good grip of the cigar with his teeth, lighted it, all
without once raising his eyes from the _Destroyer_.

As he puffed clouds of smoke for the breeze to pick up and scurry off
with to the west, he thought lovingly of the work of the last two
years, of the last month in particular. Never had men worked as had
James Blake and his