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that don’t take much picking up, either.” She paused. “We always used to do things together when he was home, and it was lovely seeing him again.”
    The evening was drawing to a close. I was tired and ready for my bed and I had the suspicion of a headache which I wasn’t anxious to provoke. “I’m going home in a little while,” I said. “Would you like something from the soda fountain before I go? An ice, or anything?”
    The hard, painted harridan of our first meeting had mergedimperceptibly into the girl friend that she had spoken of. “That’ld be lovely,” she said. “What can I have?”
    “Anything you like,” I said, a little surprised. “What do you want?”
    She hesitated. “Some of the things are rather expensive, you know.”
    I had never had that said to me by any girl before. I smiled at her. “It’s nearly the end of my holiday,” I said quietly. “I’ve got a lot of money to blue before I go back home.” And she laughed, and said: “If that’s the way of it, I’ll have a banana split.”
    So I ordered two of these things, and when the bill came it was half-a-crown. “I told you they were terribly expensive,” she said, a little ruefully. We finished them and went and danced again, and after that I sent her to find out my reckoning for me.
    She came back. “It’s twenty-five dances. That’ll be twelve and six, won’t it?” So I gave her twenty-five shillings, feeling that it was miserably inadequate for the evening that she’d given me, and she said: “Oh, that’s an awful lot. You are kind!”
    We shook hands. “I’ve enjoyed this frightfully,” I said. “It’s been the nicest evening that I’ve had for years.”
    “It has been nice,” she said simply. “I’ve loved it. You’ll come back when you’re in Leeds again, won’t you?”
    And so my hostess said good-night to me, and I went back to my hotel alone. Next morning I set out for home.

CHAPTER III
    S TENNING has kept a little black cutter,
Irene
, with me for the last three years. She is about seven tons yacht measurement; she is about thirty years old, I think, but the hull is still quite sound. She is planked with Baltic redwood upon oak frames; the only vessel I have ever seen like that. I don’t know why redwood isn’t used more; it’s cheap enough. They use it on the east coast a bit, and that’s rather interesting, because this boat was built at Yarmouth.
    He makes her earn her keep by chartering her out among his friends; when she is not away she lies moored up Bowers Creek just across the water from my yard, with
Runagate
, He uses her for his holidays and long week-ends. About a fortnight after I came back from Scotland he came down with Joan to cruise in her for a couple of days; they arrived by road one afternoon, and went on board to get squared up for an early start next morning. I put off to them after I had finished at the office, and stayed and had a meal with them on board.
    It was the first time I had seen Stenning since his return from the flight which made his name, and he was rather interesting about it. His technicalities were beyond me, but he had lived on shell-fish for a week when he got lost on some rotten little atoll near Hawaii, and he had dined with Royalty. By his own account his journey had been uneventful and the flight from the Bermudas to the Azores—two thousand miles of open sea—had bored him stiff, but he had very nearly died of eating onions in the tropics and that gave him a great fright. He didn’t like Australia, and his nearest approach to a flying crash came when he was coming in over Lambeth Bridge and nearly got bumped down on to it.
    Joan produced a sort of Irish stew for supper and we sat fora long time over it and after it, smoking and talking in a desultory manner. Stenning is a fine practical seaman of the rough-and-ready type. It’s in the blood, of course. His father was a Commander, R.N., and his grandfather; it’s a pretty good old naval