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By Root 20389 0

now to be lost in a sensitive reserve, not cold or egotistic, but strangely winning from its paradoxical frankness. Sincerity was stamped on every lineament. A deep misgiving stirred me that, clever as I thought myself, nicely perceptive of the right and congenial men to know, I had made some big mistakes--how many, I wondered? A relief, scarcely less deep because it was unconfessed, stole in on me with the suspicion that, little as I deserved it, the patient fates were offering me a golden chance of repairing at least one. And yet, I mused, the patient fates have crooked methods, besides a certain mischievous humour, for it was Davies who had asked me out--though now he scarcely seemed to need me--almost tricked me into coming out, for he might have known I was not suited to such a life; yet trickery and Davies sounded an odd conjuncture.

Probably it was the growing discomfort of my attitude which produced this backsliding. My night's rest and the 'ascent from the bath' had, in fact, done little to prepare me for contact with sharp edges and hard surfaces. But Davies had suddenly come to himself, and with an 'I say, are you comfortable? Have something to sit on?' jerked the helm a little to windward, felt it like a pulse for a moment, with a rapid look to windward, and dived below, whence he returned with a couple of cushions, which he threw to me. I felt perversely resentful of these luxuries, and asked:

'Can't I be of any use?'

'Oh, don't you bother,' he answered. 'I expect you're tired. Aren't we having a splendid sail? That must be Ekken on the port bow,' peering under the sail, 'where the trees run in. I say, do you mind looking at the chart?' He tossed it over to me. I spread it out painfully, for it curled up like a watch-spring at the least slackening of pressure. I was not familiar with charts, and this sudden trust reposed in me, after a good deal of neglect, made me nervous.

'You see Flensburg, don't you?' he said. 'That's where we are,' dabbing with a long reach at an indefinite space on the crowded sheet. 'Now which side of that buoy off the point do we pass?'

I had scarcely taken in which was land and which was water, much less the significance of the buoy, when he resumed:

'Never mind; I'm pretty sure it's all deep water about here. I expect that marks the fair-way for steamers.

In a minute or two we were passing the buoy in question, on the wrong side I am pretty certain, for weeds and sand came suddenly into view below us with uncomfortable distinctness. But all Davies said was:

'There's never any sea here, and the plate's not down,' a dark utterance which I pondered doubtfully. 'The best of these Schleswig waters,' he went on, is that a boat of this size can go almost anywhere. There's no navigation required. Why--'At this moment a faint scraping was felt, rather than heard, beneath us.

'Aren't we aground?' I asked. with great calmness.

'Oh, she'll blow over,' he replied, wincing a little.

She 'blew over', but the episode caused a little naive vexation in Davies. I relate it as a good instance of one of his minor peculiarities. He was utterly without that didactic pedantry which yachting has a fatal tendency to engender In men who profess it. He had tossed me the chart without a thought that I was an ignoramus, to whom it would be Greek, and who would provide him with an admirable subject to drill and lecture, just as his neglect of me throughout the morning had been merely habitual and unconscious independence. In the second place, master of his _métier_, as I knew him afterwards to be, resourceful, skilful, and alert, he was liable to lapse into a certain amateurish vagueness, half irritating and half amusing. I think truly that both these peculiarities came from the same source, a hatred of any sort of affectation. To the same source I traced the fact that he and his yacht observed none of the superficial etiquette of yachts and yachtsmen, that she never, for instance, flew a national ensign, and he never wore a 'yachting suit'.

We rounded a low green point which I had scarcely noticed before.