"Well, I doesn't know about that," replied Dick, looking very glum. "I'm a-thinking of the gitting back; which, wi' the tide a-setting out from the harbour, won't be so easy, I knows!" "Nonsense, Dick!" said Bob in his usual off-hand way, though bringing the cutter up to the wind, so as to go about on the other tack. "You're frightening yourself really, my boy, about nothing! The wind has got round more to the south; so we'll be able to run back to Portsmouth in no time. The cutter is a very good boat, so the Captain says, on a wind!" However, "Man proposes and God disposes." The wind suddenly dropped, just as the tide turned, the ebb setting out from Spithead towards the east, dead against them; when, instead of running in homewards "in no time," the cutter, after a time, became becalmed first, and then gradually began to drift out into the open Channel again. Dick was the first to notice this. "Look, Master Bob!" he cried. "We aren't making no headway at all! I don't see we're getting any the nearer to the Nab!" "We will, soon," replied Bob, all hopeful. "It's only because the breeze has dropped a bit. Before long, we'll pick it up again! I think, Dick, we'd better slacken off the sheets and let her bear away more!" This was done; but, still the _Zephyr_ would not move. She had net way enough, indeed, to answer her helm; for, her bows pointed west, and south, and east, alternately, as the tidal eddies swayed her in this direction and that. "I knewed we was doin' wrong," remarked Dick presently, after a long silence in which neither of the boys spoke a word. "It's a judgment on us!" "A fiddlestick!" retorted Bob. "We'll only drift about like this for a short time; and, when the tide turns again, it will sweep us back to Spithead like one o'clock!" "I doesn't believe that, Master Bob," said Dick disconsolately, sitting down on a thwart, and looking longingly at a faint speck in the distance which he thought was Southsea; although they were almost out of sight of land now, the swift current carrying the boat along nearly four knots an hour. "We should ha' tuk warnin', Master Bob, by Rover. He knowed what wer' a-coming and so he swum ashore in time, he did!" "Rover is a faithless creature!" cried Bob hotly. "I'll give him a good licking when we reach the land again, you see!" "When'll that be, Master Bob?" "Oh, some time or other before night," replied he defiantly, but Dick could easily tell from his tone of voice that he did not speak quite so buoyantly as before; and his already long face grew longer as the day wore on without the breeze springing up again or any change of circumstances.