awning were surprised
to hear the Chief say that he had known Ipsilon in peace-time. So far H.
M. S. _Sycorax_ had touched at no port, and patrolled no sea-route which
that quiet and occasionally garrulous man had not known in peace-time.
This was not surprising, as we have said, for he alone had been a
genuine wanderer upon the face of the waters. The Commander, who lived
in majestic seclusion in his own suite, had been all his life in the
Pacific trade. The First, Second, and Third Lieutenants came out of
western ocean liners. The Surgeon and Paymaster were "temporary" and
only waited the last shot to return to the comfortable sinecures, which
they averred awaited them in London and Edinburgh. So it happened that
to the Chief alone the eastern Mediterranean was a known and experienced
cruising ground; and when the _Sycorax_, detailed to escort convoys
through the intricacies of the AEgean Archipelago, awaited her
slow-moving charges in the netted and landlocked harbour of Megalovadi,
in the Island of Ipsilon, Engineer-Lieutenant Spenlove, R. N. R., said
he remembered being there eight or nine years ago, loading for
Rotterdam.

The others looked at him and then back at the enormous marble cliffs
which threw shadows almost as solid as themselves upon the waters of the
little bay, almost a cove. It was not so much that they expected
Spenlove to tell them a story as that these men had not yet tired of
each other's idiosyncrasies--another way of saying the _Sycorax_ was a
happy ship. The infiltration of landsmen, in the persons of surgeon and
paymaster, the occasional glimpses of one another caught during their
sundry small actions with the enemy, kept their intercourse sweet and
devoid of those poisonous growths of boredom and slander which too often
accumulate upon a body of men at sea like barnacles on the hull.

And in addition Spenlove was easy to look at, for he never returned the
glance. He was a solidly built man of forty odd, with a neat gray beard
and carefully tended hair. The surgeon once said Spenlove resembled an
ambassador more than an engineer, and Spenlove, without in any way
moving from his customary pose of alert yet placid abstraction, had
murmured absently:

"On one occasion, I was an ambassador. I will tell you about it some
time."

"Rotterdam?" observed Inness the paymaster--Inness was an Oxford man who
had married into a wealthy merchant's family. He said "Rotterdam"
because he had once been th