not so many minutes after it had started. The light had vanished;
we were out of the hunt somehow it seemed; our captain meant
to wait till morning, then possibly he would show us a thing.
Meanwhile there were some hours to morning. We had had no
night-firing after all. Nor did there seem to be much prospect
of any. One might as well go to bed in the dark without delay.

Morning came and we hunted around, but drew blank. Then we
started away to look for a supposed dhow in likely covers of
creeks or inlets, but we drew these blank also. What was the
vanished light? That of the resurrected German steam-tug?
Possibly. Possibly it was not that of a dhow after all. Anyhow it
was gone out of our ken. 'There's dirty work in there of night,
Craig,' the gunnery-lieutenant had said with a stern eye on that
German harbor. He spoke as a partisan. Was it such very dirty
work if they did run a little food across to feed their own
people? Anyhow their dirty work, whatever it was, had seemingly
baffled our immaculate patrol under our white ensign, for that
time at any rate.

I don't think there is anything strange about this story as it
stands up to this point, do you? There may have been a dhow ahead
of us that night in August, and it may have been its light that
our watchman spied. Also it may have put out its light all of a
sudden, and so we may have lost it in the darkness. That simple
explanation sounds probable enough, doesn't it, when you come to
think of it?

Nevertheless in the following week, a more romantic explanation
was tendered to me it concerned a gramophone.

'That was the last tune before the light was seen,' a bluejacket
told me solemnly. 'It's a good tune, you perhaps know it, sir,
"Ave Maris Stella"'? We had fraternized over recollections of
Hastings, that was his birth-place. I told him how I had been
into his church there, which was not mine, Saint Mary's, Star of
the Sea. I recalled the blue-circled chancel and its glittering
stars with admiration. Now he was confidential about what had
happened a few nights before. He seemed to regard the putting-on
of that particular gramophone record at that particular moment as
significant. I was sympathetic, but I only grasped his point
vaguely. 'You mean,' I said. 'I mean that She may have meant it,'
he said rather confusedly. 'She may have meant us luck. If we'd
only gone in straight where Her light showed, we might have found
our luck.' 'You mean we might have cap