"Cheerio!" exclaimed the visitor. "Where's everybody? Where's Wakefield this fine evening?"
Kenneth, without replying, opened the door leading into the after-cabin and took a lengthy survey; he repeated the tactics in the galley at the for'ard end of the ward-room. Then, going on his knees, he lifted the blue baize table-cloth and peered under the swing table.
"'Fraid he's not here, old man," he remarked. "Now I think of it, I believe he went on the beach at seven bells. Have a cigarette?"
"Thanks.... Wakefield wasn't on the links this afternoon. Strange—very. What's his little game, Meredith? Don't tell me he went ashore in his Number Ones, with his trousers creased an' all that sort of thing! 'A wedding has been arranged and a subscription-list will follow in due course,' eh?"
Jock McIntosh lit his cigarette and took stock of the ward-room, looking for evidence to confirm his suspicions of the absent Wakefield's mysterious visits "to the beach."
Sub-lieutenant McIntosh and Sub-lieutenant Meredith were widely different in appearance. The former was a tall, raw-boned Scot with fair features and close-cut sandy hair that even in its closeness evinced a tendency to curl. Never cut out for a seafaring life, he found himself much against his will in the uniform of an R.N.V.R. officer, while his brother Angus, who simply loved the sea and was part-owner of a yacht and knew how to handle almost every type of small craft afloat, was given a commission in a line regiment.
Jock would have made an ideal platoon commander: Angus would have shone as a skipper of an M.L.; but since from time immemorial the powers-that-be who run the Admiralty and War Office delight in putting square pegs in round holes, Jock McIntosh was manfully sticking to a job that was obviously uncongenial, while his brother was doing likewise; and each envied the other.
Meredith, on the other hand, was literally "made for the job." Slightly above middle height, broad and square-shouldered, heavy-browed and with a firm and somewhat prominent jaw, Kenneth looked and was a sailor-man, every inch of him. At the age of twelve he could handle a sailing dinghy with a skill that was the envy and admiration of many so-called yachtsmen, who would be hopelessly at sea in a double sense without the assistance of their paid hands. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen he spent every available holiday afloat in his father's ten-ton yacht, until he knew intimately the art of fore and aft sailing, and incidentally gained first-hand information of practically every harbour and creek on the south coast of England.
Then came the outbreak of the Great War. Promptly the Ripple, Mr. Meredith's cutter, was laid up, while her owner, exchanging a yachting suit for a khaki uniform, went to India as second-in-command of a Territorial battalion.
Kenneth went back to school, bitterly bewailing the fact that he had not been born three years earlier. Fellows from the senior form—in many cases physically inferior to him—donned khaki and disappeared into the mists of Flanders. At intervals some turned up at the old school, bronzed, aged and ballasted with a more than nodding acquaintance with life and death: others never returned—their names figured prominently in the School Roll of Honour as fingerposts to the path of Higher Duty.