The barometer was falling, and both wind and waves gained steadily in force as the afternoon lengthened and merged into a twilight that was itself already melting before the rising moon. Clouds were few and scattering, and it was plain there were to be no hours dark enough to offer any protection from submarine attack. Looming as large as ever, the big liner offered scarcely a better target on the side she was illuminated by the moonlight than on the one from which she was silhouetted against it. From either side a fifth of a mile of steel would "take a lot of missing," and her captain, sensibly enough, would not ease his engines by a revolution more than was necessary to keep within his destroyer screen. It was plainly up to the destroyers to stick it to the limit, and that is just what they did. As I heard one of the men put it, it was the "bruisiest" bit of escort-work they had ever been--or probably ever will be--called upon to face, but every one of those Yankee destroyers stayed with it to the finish. Now it would be the _Zop_ that would emerge from under a mountainous sea and come drifting back without steerage weigh, rolling drunkenly in the trough, and now it would be the _Zap_. And now this or that result of a "hydraulic ramming" would disable one of the others temporarily. But, game to the last flake of brine-frosted camouflage, back they came to it again, and again, and yet again. Sunrise of the next day found them plugging on in station, and in station they remained until the _Lymptania_, beyond the zone of all possible submarine danger, made a general signal of "Thank you," and headed off to the westward on her own. * * * * * Out of the dim grey dawn of the morning after the night before, battered and buckled, but still unbroken, the wearily waggling line of the _Lymptania's_ late escort trailed back into harbour. The mussed-up silhouette of every one of them bore mute testimony to the way she had been put "through the mill," and, in most cases, the things that met the eye were not the worst. The _Zop_ needed every yard of the channel as she zig-zagged up it under a jury steering-gear, and the _Zap_, like a man dazed from a blow, would have sudden "mental hiati" in which she would straggle carelessly out of line with an inconsequential going-to-pick-flowers-by-the-roadside sort of air. The _Zim's_ idiosyncrasies had more of an epileptic suddenness about them, and her hectic coughing plainly indicated some kind of "lung trouble." Our little _Zip_ presented a very brave front to the outer world, but I heard hollow clankings punctuating the erstwhile even hum of the engines, while the drip, drip, drip and the drop, drop, drop through the crinkled sheet-steel sheathing of my cabin told that the deck-plates of the forecastle fitted a good deal less snugly than before they had played anvil to the lusty head-sea hammer.