vapour on the
skyline showed the main lines of the Channel traffic.

And then, suddenly, from his place in the miniature conning-tower Reggie
saw a great blur of black smoke crossing the southern edge of the vacuum
he had selected for his hunting-ground. His binoculars flew to his
eyes, and intuitively he knew that, though he had been right in his main
conjecture, he had made a slight miscalculation of distance. The cause
of the smoke-blur, magnified by his powerful lenses into a graceful
steamer running southward at a high rate of speed, was neither a
man-of-war or a liner, but a huge yacht--just such a one as would have
been selected for a long ocean voyage. And a cry of chagrin escaped him
as he perceived that he had not taken the _Snipe_ far enough out to stop
her. She had in fact already passed him, and was now between him and the
mouth of the Channel, thus being nearer to the open door of the trap he
would have closed than he was.

"What's her speed?" he asked, passing the glasses to his
second-lieutenant. "I put it at about twenty-five."

The other, after a careful scrutiny of the receding vessel, gave it as
his opinion that twenty knots was nearer the mark. Anyway, bar fog, the
_Snipe_, with her thirty-knot engines, ought to be able to catch her in
something under five hours.

"Yes, if she is doing her best now," said Reggie doubtfully. "She may be
keeping a bit up her sleeve for an emergency. But we'll shove this old
hooker along at her top notch anyhow."

So, with disrespect, do the boys to whom the nation entrusts its
mosquito fleet speak of the little spitfires they love--a disrespect
which they would swiftly and haughtily resent if it was evinced by any
but themselves.

A word to the man at the wheel caused the _Snipe's_ ugly snout to swing
round for her quarry, and then the engine-room gong clanged its sharp
command, "Full speed ahead." Reggie, with his eyes glued to his glasses,
watched like a cat for any increase of speed or suggestive manoeuvre
on the part of the chase, but she held on her way as if supremely
indifferent to, or unconscious of, the fact that she was being pursued
by the destroyer.

"She's slowing down a trifle, isn't she, sir?" Parsons called up to his
chief after the pursuit had lasted twenty minutes or so. "That doesn't
look as if she had a guilty conscience."

Reggie was of the same opinion on both points. The yacht certainly was
not travelling so fast as when first sighted