The old lieutenant of Coastguards flushed with pleasure.
"Never had a chance to go to sea in one of them, Sir," he said—"long after my time, I am sorry to say."
"Look!" Marjorie whispered to Doris, "they're opening out. Isn't it wonderful? How near they're getting! It's just like a figure in the Lancers."
Doris did not answer for a moment. Then she said:—"What's that, right in the middle?"
The Admiral overheard her.
"You've quick eyes, young lady," he answered; "that, unless I am very much mistaken, is a certain Submarine, lately in possession of the Kaiser, and which people are talking about a good deal just now!"
It was so. The destroyers slowed down, and made a great lane upon the sea. In the centre of this lane was something infinitely small, a black speck, like a cork floating on the water.
It grew and grew.
Then, from somewhere not far away, there was the heavy boom of a gun. Immediately, the air was rent with a noise like hundreds of bellowing bulls as all the ships at anchor opened their steam-sirens until the very stone quays trembled.
The cheers of thousands of voices, the wild tossing of hats into the air, the fluttering of hand-kerchiefs like sudden snow; and then, the Submarine, its whale-back ploughing through the Harbour waters, a white wake of foam behind it, came into full view. From the periscope fluttered two little flags, black and white. In half a minute the cheering, delirious crowd saw what they were.