Then she heard a faint voice reply:
“Hulloa, Croydon! G.E.A.Y. answering. I am just over Boulogne; visibility much better. Thanks, Tubby! Switching off.”
Roddy removed the telephones from his ears, and remarked:
“I hope your father will be interested.”
“He will, I’m certain. It’s topping,” the girl declared, “but it’s rather weird though.”
“Yes—to the uninitiated,” he replied. Then, glancing at his wrist-watch, he said: “It’s time that New Brunswick began to work with Carnarvon. Let us see if we can get the American station.”
He changed the small coils of wires for ones treble their size, and having adjusted them, they both listened again.
“There he is!” Roddy exclaimed. “Sending his testing ‘V’s’ in Morse. Do you hear them—three shorts and one long?”
In the ’phones the girl could hear them quite plainly, though the sending station was across the Atlantic.
Then the signals stopped. Instantly the great Marconi station gave the signal “go.” And Roddy, taking up a pencil, scribbled down the first message of the series, a commercial message addressed to a shipping firm in Liverpool from their New York agent concerning freights, followed, with scarce a pause, by a congratulatory message upon somebody’s marriage—two persons named Gladwyn—and then a short Press message recording what the President had said in Congress an hour before.