walked up the path between Captain Saulsby’s bent, old willow trees, a sullen boy who had sniffed the salt breeze disdainfully and vowed that he did not like it. That was some entirely different person whose name might have happened to be Billy Wentworth, but who had nothing whatever in common with the boy he was now. He closed his eyes as he was thinking it over, and even might have dozed a little until a sudden exclamation from the nearest officer startled him into alert attention. The rapid volley of excited orders that followed told him at once that something unusual must have occurred, and, forgetting all caution in his eager interest, he stood upright that he might watch the better. It seemed as though he saw a looming bulk in the blackness ahead of them, as though he actually heard a voice speaking somewhere beyond there in the dark. Then, all in a breath, a myriad of electric lights went on and there sprang into form the outline of a huge battleship, right across their bows. She seemed to tower above them like a mountain, enormous, massive, moving at no very great speed, but inexorably as though there were no hope of her swerving or checking her course.
