the year, and thought us mad enough as it was to have been afloat so
long, and madder still to intend living on 'so little a ship' when we
could live on land with beer and music handy. I was tempted to raise
the North Sea question, just to watch Davies under the thunder of
rebukes which would follow. But I refrained from a wish to be tender
with him, now that all was going so well. The Frisian Islands were an
extravagant absurdity now. I did not even refer to them as we pulled
back to the Dulcibella, after swearing eternal friendship with the
good pilot and his family.

Davies and I turned in good friends that night--or rather I should
say that I turned in, for I left him sucking an empty pipe and
aimlessly fingering a volume of Mahan; and once when I woke in the
night I felt somehow that his bunk was empty and that he was there in
the dark cabin, dreaming.



7 The Missing Page

I WOKE (on 1st October) with that dispiriting sensation that a hitch
has occurred in a settled plan. It was explained when I went on deck,
and I found the Dulcibella wrapped in a fog, silent, clammy, nothing
visible from her decks but the ghostly hull of a galliot at anchor
near us. She must have brought up there in the night, for there had
been nothing so close the evening before; and I remembered that my
sleep had been broken once by sounds of rumbling chain and gruff
voices.

'This looks pretty hopeless for to-day,' I said, with a shiver, to