“Row--row hard!” it cried, and with a frenzied churning of oars in the water, the other boat shot by them, making down the estuary. Next moment it had quite vanished in the mist, leaving behind it knots of swirling water from its oar-blades. Michael started in vain pursuit; his craft was heavy and clumsy, and from the retreating and faint-growing sound of the other, it was clear that he could get no pace to match, still less to overtake them. Soon he pantingly desisted. “But an Admiralty boat wouldn’t have run away,” he said. “They’d have asked us who the devil we were.” “But who else was it?” asked Francis. Michael mopped his forehead. “Aunt Barbara would tell you,” he said. “She would tell you that they were German spies.” Francis laughed. “Or Timbuctoo niggers,” he remarked. “And that would be an odd thing, too,” said Michael. But at that moment he felt the first chill of the shadow that menaced, if by chance Aunt Barbara was right, and if already the clear tranquillity of the sky was growing dim as with the mist that lay that afternoon on the waters of the deep reach, and covered mysterious movements which were going on below it. England and Germany--there was so much of his life and his heart there. Music and song, and Sylvia. CHAPTER X Michael had heard the verdict of the brain specialist, who yesterday had seen his mother, and was sitting in his room beside his unopened piano quietly assimilating it, and, without making plans of his own initiative, contemplating the forms into which the future was beginning to fall, mapping itself out below him, outlining itself as when objects in a room, as the light of morning steals in, take shape again. And even as they take the familiar shapes, so already he felt that he had guessed all this in that week down at Ashbridge, from which he had returned with his father and mother a couple of days before.