“Can you see land?”

“There’s a mist.”

“Lie to, then, till the sun’s up.”

Duncan lay the boat to for a couple of hours, till the mist was tinged with gold and the ball of the sun showed red on his starboard quarter.  The mist sank, the brown sails of a smack thrust upwards through it; coastwards it shifted and thinned and thickened, as though cunningly to excite expectation as to what it hid.  Again Weeks called out—­

“See anything?”

“Yes,” said Duncan, in a perplexed voice.  “I see something.  Looks like a sort of mediaeval castle on a rock.”

A shout of laughter answered him.

“That’s the Gorleston Hotel.  The harbour-mouth’s just beneath.  We’ve hit it fine,” and while he spoke the mist swept clear, and the long, treeless esplanade of Yarmouth lay there a couple of miles from Duncan’s eyes, glistening and gilded in the sun like a row of dolls’ houses.

“Haul in your sheets a bit,” said Weeks.  “Keep no’th of the hotel, for the tide’ll set you up and we’ll sail her in without dawdlin’ behind a tug.  Get your mainsail down as best you can before you make the entrance.”

Half an hour afterwards the smack sailed between the pier-heads.

“Who are you?” cried the harbour-master.

“The Willing Mind.”

“The Willing Mind’s reported lost with all hands.”

“Well, here’s the Willing Mind,” said Duncan, “and here’s one of the hands.”

The irrepressible voice bawled up the companion to complete the sentence—­

“And the owner’s reposin’ in his cabin.”  But in a lower key he added words for his own ears.  “There’s the old woman to meet.  Lord! but the Willing Mind has cost me dear.”

HOW BARRINGTON RETURNED TO JOHANNESBURG.

Norris wanted a holiday.  He stood in the marketplace looking southwards to the chimney-stacks, and dilating upon the subject to three of his friends.  He was sick of the Stock Exchange, the men, the women, the drinks, the dances—­everything.  He was as indifferent to the price of shares as to the rise and fall of the quicksilver in his barometer; he neither desired to go in on the ground floor nor to come out in the attics.  He simply wanted to get clean away.  Besides he foresaw a slump, and he would be actually saving money on the veld.  At this point Teddy Isaacs strolled up and interrupted the oration.

“Where are you off to, then?”

“Manicaland,” answered Norris.

“Oh!  You had better bring Barrington back.”

Teddy Isaacs was a fresh comer to the Rand, and knew no better.  Barrington meant to him nothing more than the name of a man who had been lost twelve months before on the eastern borders of Mashonaland.  But he saw three pairs of eyebrows lift simultaneously, and heard three simultaneous outbursts on the latest Uitlander grievance.  However, Norris answered him quietly enough.