Then, all in a moment, a towering black shape materialized from the darkness, and bore down upon them with the rush of a railway train--out of the night, without lights, without warning, it passed. To them, as the yawl wallowed in the wake of its seething track, there seemed to be inches only to spare! Of course there was very much more, but the nearness was rather staggering all the same. The three on the little yacht saw the keen knife edge of the bows speed by with high fountains of water flung up either side the cutting line. It was a moment of tense excitement. Adrian gave a suppressed shout. "Oh, Crow, did you see her--the beauty! A destroyer! I say, how awfully _alive_ they are--isn’t one jolly proud of them?" "It was rather a near thing, wasn’t it?" murmured Christobel, holding on as the yawl leaped. "Jolly well worth it, though. I’ve never seen a destroyer pass so close, on her ’lawful occasions’," answered Adrian, quoting a certain well-known story; "nothing can take that from one." The drumming faded away down wind, and the Romilly pair settled again to wait for the slow-coming dawn, when suddenly Adrian gave a whoop--a positive wild Indian screech. "Oh, I say, Crow, look--look! Of all the crowning luck, this is----" Moving over the "face of the waters", over the black tossing waste, was a ladder of dazzling white light. It searched in miles, it searched in inches, like some living, busy, sensing creature. Christobel thought of the fingers of light in the "Martians", that hunted for the victims. It was thrilling. Dumb, dazed, they watched the brilliant feelers creeping over the water. Crow hardly breathed; she was standing, just petrified. Suddenly Adrian slammed his hand down on the tiller. "_They’re looking for us_!" he cried. "Great Scot! Of all the----" "Oh, but, Addie, how could they have----" "My good girl, do you suppose anything escapes the Navy? The look-outs saw our little bit of a blink; they want to know who we are--they know everything--they are simply _It_." Adrian’s rhapsody was cut off on his lips; the dazzling feeler had found them. It rested on the white yawl, and stayed. He waved his arm wildly; Crow waved both arms. The Countess sprang to her feet, shielding her face with her sleeve, and the white light glinted upon her golden hair plait. Under the searching brilliance Adrian and Crow put _Messenger_ up in the wind, and she lay-to--wet, ragged, battered, shaken, most disreputable, with her drenched mainsail, her flapping storm-jib no bigger than a towel, while the poor little dinghy reeled alongside drunkenly, the water washing over her floor boards.