"Thirteen," replied Strange proudly. "With a good wind astern fourteen. Once I went out past the Needles buoy----" and off he went in a glowing account of a passage to Cherbourg at the end of a stormy September. Slingsby never once interrupted him. He followed meekly from the rudder to the bow, where he examined with some attention the famous struts and cross-pieces.
"You have got a wireless, I see," he said, looking up to the aerial, which, slackened and disconnected, dangled from the masthead.
"Yes. But it's a small affair. However, I can hear four hundred miles if the night's still. I can only send seventy."
Slingsby nodded, and the two men returned to the saloon. There, at last, over a whisky and soda. Strange was encouraged to unload his soul. The torture of the August nights on the Berkshire Downs above the Thames Valley, the intolerable sense of uselessness; the feeling that he wore a brand of shame upon his forehead for all men to see, and the poignancy of the remorse which had shrivelled him when a wounded soldier from Ypres or Le Cateau limped past him in the street; all tumbled from his lips in abrupt, half-finished sentences.
"Therefore I ran away," he said.
Slingsby sat back in his chair.
"So that's it," he said, and he laughed in a friendly fashion. "Do you know that we have all been greatly worried about you? Oh, you have caused a deuce of a fluttering I can tell you."
Strange flushed scarlet.
"I was suspected!" he cried. "Good God!" It just wanted that to complete his utter shame. He had been worse than useless; he had given trouble. He sat with his eyes fixed, in the depths of abasement. Then other words were spoken to him:
"How long will it take you to bring your boat to Marseilles?"