Strange looked at the German hard. He looked also towards a youth who had been sitting for the last hour over a cup of coffee and a newspaper outside the window. Slingsby interpreted the look.
"He's all right. He's trying to listen, of course. Most foreigners do, whether they understand your language or not. And he doesn't--not a word of it. I have been watching him. However, we may as well go, for I would very much like you to show me your little boat."
Strange, eager and enthusiastic, jumped up from the table.
"Rather," he cried. "She's not big, of course, but she can keep the sea, especially since I strengthened her bows."
"Oh, you have done that, have you?" said Slingsby, as he paid the bill. "That's interesting."
They crossed the boulevard to the quay and went on board the _Boulotte_. Every inch of brass on her, from the stanchions round the deck to the engine-room telegraph, flashed, and she was varnished and white and trim like a lady fresh from her maid.
"What can you do with your forced draught?" asked Slingsby.
"Thirteen," replied Strange proudly. "With a good wind astern fourteen. Once I went out past the Needles buoy----" and off he went in a glowing account of a passage to Cherbourg at the end of a stormy September. Slingsby never once interrupted him. He followed meekly from the rudder to the bow, where he examined with some attention the famous struts and cross-pieces.
"You have got a wireless, I see," he said, looking up to the aerial, which, slackened and disconnected, dangled from the masthead.
"Yes. But it's a small affair. However, I can hear four hundred miles if the night's still. I can only send seventy."
Slingsby nodded, and the two men returned to the saloon. There, at last, over a whisky and soda. Strange was encouraged to unload his soul. The torture of the August nights on the Berkshire Downs above the Thames Valley, the intolerable sense of uselessness; the feeling that he wore a brand of shame upon his forehead for all men to see, and the poignancy of the remorse which had shrivelled him when a wounded soldier from Ypres or Le Cateau limped past him in the street; all tumbled from his lips in abrupt, half-finished sentences.
"So that's it," he said, and he laughed in a friendly fashion. "Do you know that we have all been greatly worried about you? Oh, you have caused a deuce of a fluttering I can tell you."