The reappearance of the boy was a welcome relief to the chief officer’s lungs and intelligence; it added fuel to his flame. He very nearly leapt down from the bridge in his paroxysms of wrath, and heaven only knows what he would have done to the wretched lad whom he would render responsible for the misadventure had he not at that moment caught sight of a little speck upon the sunlit water far astern: it was the head of George Mulross Demaine, battling with fate. The prospective Warden of the Court of Dowry could swim fairly well. It had been his practice to swim in a tank. He had swum now and then near shore, but he had no conception of the amount of salt water that can get into a man’s mouth in a really long push over a sea however slightly broken, especially if one enters that sea in a sort of bundle, without taking a proper header. Moreover, the phenomenon of the tide astonished him; he had imagined in his innocence that the sea also was a kind of tank and that he had a dead course of it for the shore, the nearest point of which lay just eastward of the harbour mouth. As it was, England seemed to be flitting by at a terrible rate, and the _Lily_, when he turned upon his back and floated for a moment to observe her, had all the appearance of a ship proceeding at full speed up Channel, so rapidly did he drift away. He swam too hurriedly and he exhausted himself, for his mind was full of terrors: they might fire upon him--he did not know what dreadful arsenal the _Lily_ might not contain! He remembered having noticed upon the cross-Channel steamers exceedingly bright little brass guns, the purpose and use of which had often troubled him. Now he knew!--and he hoped against hope that no such instrument of death swivelled upon the poop of the _Lily_. He dreaded every moment to catch the sharp spit of flame against the sunlight, a curl of smoke, the scream of the light shell, the ricochet, the boom that would come later sullenly upon the air, and all the rest that he had read of:--the first shot to find the range: the dreadful second that would sink him. He was relieved, as minute after minute passed, and no such experiment in marine ballistics was tried. There was faintly borne to his ears as he was swept down the ceaseless stream of Ocean, a little clamour which, on the spot itself, was a roaring babel; he saw a group of men wrestling with the davits, but the davits were stiff, and boat-drill was not in the programme of the _Lily_. Indeed of all the crew but two had ever handled such a contrivance as a davit before, and of these one was an Italian.