The Crown and winged double-thunderbolt must have nerved the arm they came back to. For, on the day of the Battle of Jutland, when a point-blank salvo from an enemy cruiser wrecked the bridge and searchlight platform, carrying away the forward mast and funnel of Macrombie’s particular tin-pot, and men in respirators were fighting the smothering fumes of the fire caused by German shells of the incendiary description, a dour, stark man whose clothes were alight and burning on him, stuck grimly to his post among the wreckage of the shattered Wireless room, sending out the message last dictated by the officer who lay dead across the blistering steel plating—for the short circuit set up by the smashed searchlight had created its own separate conflagration, and the electricity was "running out of everything like oil." When the tin-pot heeled over, and, having duly buried her steel chest and secret documents, went down with colours flying in a smother of oily steam, men who were saved on the rafts told this tale of Macrombie, who sleeps well, after Life’s thirsty fever, at his post in the Destroyer’s battered Wireless cabin, on the deep-ridged, sandy bottom of the wild, shallow North Sea. Patrine felt her heart crushed as in the grip of a cold steel gauntlet. Her apprehensions had not been unfounded. She and Alan were to be parted, if not as she had feared. "I—suppose I ought to congratulate you—" Her unwilling eyes admired the tall manly figure in the plain workmanlike uniform. The buttonless tunic with its Lancer plastron, the riding-breeches of ampler cut than the cavalryman’s, the high spurless boots of supple brown leather, and the belt that carried a revolver and no sword. "What—what are you in?" she asked draggingly, and he answered with a smile and a flash of his grey eyes: "I hope I’m in for some of what’s going on!" "How glad you are!" "Rather. I should think so! Now that they’ve let me into the Royal Flying Corps as a T.S.L. Look at my wings!" He touched the white outspread pinions on the tunic-breast with a reverent finger-tip and went on pouring out his story without a break. "It’s cost me some badgering of High Officials of Military Aëronautics at Whitehall, and a lot of time wasted in baby tests. Squad drill, Harris tube, bomb-dropping, air-signalling, Webley and Scott practice, and so on. Now I’m teaching trick-flying to Army aviators from 4.30 A.M. till 11 P.M. The Powers that Be have taken over the Flying Schools—Durrant’s Café is our Officer’s Mess now. You should see old Durrant in his glory as Head Waiter. And Mrs. D—" His white teeth flashed as he laughed. "And they have known of this"—she nodded at the eagle-wings—"while I have been kept in ignorance! How long?" "Not quite a fortnight. Don’t be unreasonable, dear!"