The India-rubber Man laughed.
"Well, not dinner exactly. But I went down to Osborne College once and stood him a blow-out at the tuck-shop."
His companion nodded darkly in the direction of the King's Messenger.
"Shouldn't wonder if Thorogood was feeling like that lad Joe. Useful fellow to travel with, Thorogood."
[1] Submarine.
CHAPTER III
ULTIMA THULE
Across the stormy North Sea came the first faint streak of dawn. It overtook a long line of Destroyers rolling landward with battered bridge-screens and salt-crusted funnels; it met a flotilla of mine-sweeping Sloops, labouring patiently out to their unending task. It lit the frowning cliffs, round which wind-tossed gulls wailed and breakers had thundered the beat of an ocean's pulse throughout the ages.
The Destroyers were not sorry to see the dawn. The night was their task-master: in darkness they worked and in the Shadow of Death. They passed within hailing distance of the Sloops, and on board the reeling Destroyers here and there a figure in streaming oilskins raised his arm and waved a salutation to the squat grey craft setting forth in the comfortless dawn to holystone Death's doorstep.
The Mine-sweepers refrained from any such amenity. Anon the darkness would come again, when no man may sweep for mines. Then would be their turn for grins and the waving of arms. In the meanwhile, they preferred to remain grim and restless as their work.