“My!” cried Tommy. “Who did that whistle? It was enough to beat the cars.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know!” Audrey retorted.
The embarkation, under Audrey’s direction, was accomplished in safety, and, save for one tiny French scream, in silence. The silence, which persisted, was peculiar. Each pair should have had something to tell the other, yet nothing was told, or even asked. Mr. Gilman rowed with careful science, and brought the dinghy alongside the yacht in an unexceptionable manner. Musa stood on deck apart, acting indifference. Madame Piriac, having climbed into the Ariadne, went below at once. Miss Thompkins, seeing her friend Mr. Price half-way down the saloon companion, moved to speak to him, and they vanished together. Mr. Gilman was respectfully informed by the engineer that the skipper and Dr. Cromarty were ashore.
“How nice it is on the water!” said Audrey to Mr. Gilman in a low, gentle voice. “There is a channel round there with three feet of water in it at low tide.” She sketched a curve in the air with her finger. “Of course you know this part,” said Mr. Gilman cautiously and even apprehensively. His glance seemed to be saying: “And it was you who gave that fearful whistle, too! Are you, can you be, all that I dreamed?”
“I do,” Audrey answered. “Would you like me to show it you.”
“I should be more than delighted,” said Mr. Gilman.
With a gesture he summoned a man to untie the dinghy again and hold it, and the man slid down into the dinghy like a monkey.
“I’ll pull,” said Audrey, in the boat.
The man sprang out of the dinghy.
“One instant!” Mr. Gilman begged her, standing up in the sternsheets, and popping his head through a porthole of the saloon. “Mr. Price!”