202

CHAPTER XVII.
SOME GRAVE FEARS 220

CHAPTER XVIII.
THE TRUTH REVEALED 235

THE MYSTERY OF THE GREEN RAY

CHAPTER I.

BESIDE STILL WATERS.

The youth in the multi-coloured blazer laughed.

"You'd have to come and be a nurse," he suggested.

"Oh, I'd go as a drummer-boy. I'd look fine in uniform, wouldn't I?"
the waitress simpered in return.

Dennis Burnham swallowed his liqueur in one savage gulp, pushed back
his chair, and rose from the table.

"Silly young ass," he said, in a voice loud enough for the object of
his wrath to hear. "Let's get outside."

The four of us rose, paid our bill, and went out, leaving the youth
and his flippant companions to themselves. For it was Bank Holiday,
August the third, 1914, and I think, though it was the shortest and
most uneventful of all our river "annuals," it is the one which we are
least likely to forget. On the Saturday Dennis, Jack Curtis, Tommy
Evans and myself had started from Richmond on our yearly trip up the
river. Even as we sat in the two punts playing bridge, moored at our
first camping-place below Kingston Weir, disquieting rumours reached
us in the form of excited questions from the occupants of passing
craft. And now, as we rose from the dinner-table at the Magpie,
Sunbury, two days later, it seemed that war was inevitable.

"What I can't understand," growled Dennis, as we stepped into one of
the punts and paddled idly across to the lock, "is how any young idiot
can treat the whole thing as a terrific joke. If we go to war with
Germany--and it seems we must--it's going to be----Good Heavens! who
knows what it's going to be!"

"Meaning," said Tom, who never allowed any thought to remain
half-expressed, "meaning that we are not prepared, and they are. We
have to step straight into the ring untrained to meet an opponent who
has been getting ready night and day for the Lord knows how many
years."

"Still, you know," said Jack, who invariably found the bright spot in
everything, "we never did any good as a nation until we were pushed."

"We shall be pushed this time," I replied; "and if we do go to war, we
shall all be wanted."

"And wanted at once," Tom added.

"Which brings me to the point which most concerns us," said Dennis,
with a serious face. "What are _we_ going to do?"

"It seems to me," I repli