John Egerton groped in the locker for rowlocks with an oppressive sense of incompetence and delay. His fingers moved with an ineffectual urgency in a messy confusion of spanners and oil-cans, tins of grease, and slimy labyrinths of thin cord. Only one rowlock was discoverable. The finding of the second became in his mind a task of inconceivable importance and difficulty. Vast issues depended on it--Stephen ... Margery ... babies ... Emily Gaunt ... and somehow or other Mrs. Bantam. Thunderous mutterings rolled down distantly from the bows. John groaned helplessly. He caught his fingers sharply on the edge of a screw-driver. "It's not here ... it's not here ... it _can't_ be, Stephen." With a sense of heroic measures he hauled out in clattering handfuls the whole muddle of implements in the locker. Under the electric coil lurked the missing rowlock. "Row, then, like the devil," ordered Stephen. Out here, in this strange watery adventure, Stephen was the readily acknowledged commander. John rowed, with grunts and splashings. They rounded the Island, the moon glowing remotely beyond it through the traceries of young willow stems. Stephen was doing something with an anchor at the mouth of the sack, breathing audibly through his nose. John sculled obliquely across the river, struggling against the tide, steadily losing ground, he felt. "Losing ground," he thought insanely, "ought to be losing _water_, of course." So strangely do the minds of men move in critical hours. When they were half-way over, the chunk-chunk of a motor-boat came lazily upstream. "God!" said Stephen, "a police-boat." John thought, "Will it _never_ end?" It was appalling, this accumulation of obstacles and delays and potential witnesses. He was tired now, and acutely conscious of a general perspiration. They drifted downstream under the bank, while the police-boat phutted up on the far side, a low black shape without lights. Caped figures chattered easily in the stern and took no evident notice of the small white motor-boat under the bank; but Stephen and John imagined fatal suspicions and perceptions proceeding under the peaked caps. They passed. "_Now!_" Stephen was fiddling with his anchor again, tugging at a knot; his tone was final. "Take her out into the middle again ... _quick_!" John pulled gallantly with his left. They were opposite the house again now, moving smoothly towards Hammersmith Bridge. No other craft was in sight or sound. Stephen said thickly, "If we don't get her over now, we never shall ... stand by.... No, no ... you trim the boat.... I'll manage it."