The trumpeter astern has come up and sighted our wake and fog-buoy, and the clamour of her questing syren is stilled. She looms up close on our quarter, a huge menacing bulk of sheering steel with the foam thundering under her bows and curling and shattering on her grey hull. _They_ have great difficulty in adjusting to our speed. She slows and fades back into the mist, grows again from gloomy shadow to threatening detail, steadies at a point for a few minutes, and resumes the round of her previous motions in irritating cycle. "Whatever can be the matter with them?" (We take the stout point of a position as steady as the Rock, and grow scornful of their clumsy efforts to keep station.) "_Huh!_ These gold-laced London men! Why can't they steady up a bit? Why can't they----" We note that our steering-mark and the wash of _War Ordnance's_ propeller are no longer in sight ahead, and set in to count the beats of the screw. ". . . t'-one, t'-two, t'-three, t'-- _Hell!_ Didn't we order seventy? Go full speed!" Jumping to the tube, the junior attends. "_I_ said seven-owe, sir, but he thought I said six-four! Says th' bl--, th' engines working, sir--can't hear properly!" Grudgingly, as though loath to give us our sight again, the fog clears. The first of the tantalizing rift in the curtain is signalled by the high look-out, who calls that he can see the topmasts of our near neighbours piercing the low-lying vapours. The sun shines through, showing now and then a clear-cut limb in place of the luminous misshapen brightening that has been with us since sunrise. In fits and starts the fog thins, and thickens again, at the will of wandering airs. A west wind comes away, freshens, and stirs the vapour till it whips close overhead in wraiths and streamers, raises here and there a fold on the distant horizon, then dies again. Growing in vigour, the breeze returns; a gallant breath that ruffles the smooth of the sea and sweeps the round of it, routing the lingering flurries that settle, dust-like, when the mass is cleared.