‘Your pardon, Lord. I shall refuse to come.’ ‘Thank God for that.’ ‘Then I shall most certainly _insist_ on coming next trip. I shall----’ ‘How far off were they when you first saw them?’ broke in a voice from the other end of the ward room. ‘Oh, about four miles. I saw the smoke at first and hustled off in their direction.’ ‘You must have had a pretty long fug afterwards, didn’t you?’ ‘It was a bit mouldy sitting on the bottom, but we managed to turn up smiling.’ The talk drifted out and turned to other topics. ‘178’ was due in to-morrow, and her patrol and herself and her officers were also discussed with much freedom. Later the ward room was closed, and the _Parentis_ went to sleep, but still with one eye open, and watchful to guard the charges that lay alongside her. Next day Carruthers and Johnson went out on patrol, and in the late afternoon a new boat arrived, fresh and hot from the dockyard, commanded by one Singleton, an officer well known to the boat captains of the _Parentis_. Raymond and Austin had a day off, rather an unexpected favour in the case of the former, who had only just returned from re-fit, and decided to spend it in the country. They left early and caught a train after breakfast for the sleepy little town of Langton, some twenty miles distant. After the noise and bustle of a shipbuilding and mining centre, the pleasant peace of the English country came as a welcome change, and they lay back in their carriage and drank in great gulps of the fresh morning air as the local rattled sedately on. A fine summer day and the hedges alongside the railway, and the fields all gold, brown, and green, with little cottages nestling among them, and level crossings with children who waved sitting on the gates, and horses grazing, and reaping machines, and white high loads. Hayricks and little villages, small woods and distant spires. Imagine all this under the heel of an invader! The woman in the blue print apron standing outside the cottage, the children playing with the farmer’s old dog among the barley sheaves, imagine them with the Germans in possession ... butchery, rape, and at the best robbery and ill-treatment, and yet Belgium.... It didn’t bear thinking of. There was no possibility of invasion or wanton destruction. It hadn’t happened for hundreds of years, but then ... it must have been the same when the horsemen rode in and the old muzzle-loaders blared out, and men died and women shrieked and children clung to their mothers’ skirts, wide eyed and amazed.