"The car can remain. It is—not mine."
The Prince inclined his head.
"Then we will go down to the cove. Vita!"
At the gentle tone of his voice the woman moved at once to his side. Whatever his innermost thoughts and feeling's, he had conveyed to her troubled heart the assurance of his perfect love and sympathy.
A man stood in the steel doorway of the clumsy tower which supported a pair of periscopes. The vessel was an early type of submarine. It was crude in finish and severe in fashion. Its flush deck was narrow, and a mere rail protected its sides.
His attention seemed divided between a group of men in oilskins engaged in launching a motor pinnace, and the movements of a war-craft standing off some distance astern.
Night was closing upon an oily sea, which lolled in listless fashion beneath the starry sheen of a now almost windless evening. The threatened "northeaster" which had been developing all the afternoon had suddenly died out under the influence of a sharp frost. There was a certain satisfaction in the luck of the weather. This man knew quite well what he might have been called upon to face on the bitter northeast coast of Britain.
The stone-grey eyes of the man were no less keen than the bitter air. Nor were they less watchful than the peeping stars already beginning to stud the sky. The rest of his face was lost in the folds of a woollen scarf, which was in turn enveloped in the high collar of his overcoat.
There was the sound of footsteps behind him coming up the steel companion, and in a moment he was joined by a man in oilskins. The latter were carelessly adjusted about the neck, and from beneath them peeped the details of a uniform which was foreign to the coast off which the vessel was lying.
The newcomer joined in the survey of the war-craft's dim outline against the horizon.