“Yes,” he said, as though continuing a conversation. “Yes. We’ll have to give Guernsey a miss.”
“Oh! Are you going straight to Jersey, then?”
In the back of my mind I knew that the course we were on was taking us away from the one island as fast as from the other; but I had not thought it out, and felt there must be some way of accounting for the manœuvre.
“No. I’m afraid we’ll have to give Jersey a miss too. In fact, we’ll have to cut out the islands altogether this trip.”
“Really? That’s very disappointing. Are we going straight back?”
“Oh no. No, we’ll not go back for a bit.”
“Well, where on earth are we going, Captain Welfare?”
Captain Welfare slowly finished his drink and looked as if he were pondering the advisability of taking another. He finally put his glass down a little tremulously.
“The fact is—you saw this message come aboard?”
“Yes.”