among those Frisian islands--' His tone was timid and interrogative,
and I felt at once that he was sounding me as to some unpalatable
plan whose nature began to dawn on me.

He stammered on through a sentence or two about 'wildness' and
'nobody to interfere with you,' and then I broke in: 'You surely
don't want to leave the Baltic?'

'Why not?' said he, staring into the compass.

'Hang it, man!' I returned, tartly, 'here we are in October, the
summer over, and the weather gone to pieces. We're alone in a
cockle-shell boat, at a time when every other yacht of our size is
laying up for the winter. Luckily, we seem to have struck an ideal
cruising-ground, with a wide choice of safe fiords and a good
prospect of ducks, if we choose to take a little trouble about them.
You can't mean to waste time and run risks' (I thought of the tom
leaf in the log-book) 'in a long voyage to those forbidding haunts of
yours in the North Sea.'

'It's not very long,' said Davies, doggedly. 'Part of it's canal, and
the rest is quite safe if you're careful. There's plenty of sheltered
water, and it's not really necessary--'

'What's it all for?' I interrupted, impatiently. 'We haven't _tried_
for shooting here yet. You've no notion, have you, of getting the
boat back to England this autumn?'

'England?' he muttered. 'Oh, I don't much care.' Again his vagueness
jarred on me; there seemed to be some bar between us, invisible and