The Ray runs right down to Southend Pier, but there are several narrow openings out of it connecting with the river.  Through one of these Tommy steered his course, bringing us into the main stream a few hundred yards down from where we had been lying.  Then, turning her round, he handed the tiller over to Joyce, and clambered up alongside of me on to the roof of the cabin.

“Come on, Neil,” he said.  “I’ve had enough of this penny steamer business.  Let’s get out the sails and shove along like gentlemen.”

The Betty’s rig was not a complicated one.  It consisted of a mainsail, a jib, and a spinnaker, and in a very few minutes we had set all three of them and were bowling merrily upstream with the dinghy bobbing and dipping behind us.  Tommy jumped down and switched off the engine, while Joyce, resigning the tiller to me, climbed up and seated herself on the boom of the mainsail.  She had taken off her hat, and her hair gleamed in the sunshine like copper in the firelight.

I don’t think we did much talking for the first few miles:  at least I know I didn’t.  There is no feeling in the way of freedom quite so fine as scudding along in a small ship with a good breeze behind you; and after being cooped up for three years in a prison cell I drank in the sensation like a man who has been almost dying of thirst might gulp down his first draught of water.  The mere tug of the tiller beneath my hand filled me with a kind of fierce delight, while the splash of the water as it rippled past the sides of the boat seemed to me the bravest and sweetest music I had ever heard.

I think Joyce and Tommy realized something of what I was feeling, for neither of them made any real attempt at conversation.  Now and then the latter would jump up to haul in or let out the main sheet a little, and once or twice he pointed out some slight alteration which had been recently made in the buoying of the river.  Joyce sat quite still for the most part, either smiling happily at me, or else watching the occasional ships and barges that we passed, most of which were just beginning to get under way.

We had rounded Canvey Island and left Hole Haven some little distance behind us, when Tommy, who was leaning over the side staring out ahead, suddenly turned back to me.

“There’s someone coming round the point in a deuce of a hurry,” he remarked.  “Steam launch from the look of it.  Better give ’em a wide berth, or we’ll have their wash aboard.”

I bent down and took a quick glance under the spinnaker boom.  A couple of hundred yards ahead a long, white, vicious-looking craft was racing swiftly towards us, throwing up a wave on either side of her bows that spread out fanwise across the river.

I shoved down the helm, and swung the Betty a little off her course so as to give them plenty of room to go by.  They came on without slackening speed in the least, and passed us at a pace which I estimated roughly to be about sixteen knots an hour.  I caught a momentary glimpse of a square-shouldered man with a close-trimmed auburn beard crouching in the stern, and then the next moment a wave broke right against our bows, drenching all three of us in a cloud of flying spray.