“This morning?”

“Yes.  Eight o’clock.”

“What?  Is there a strange man in the village?”

“You don’t mean to say you haven’t seen the yacht!”

“Yacht?” Miss Ingate showed some excitement.

“Come and look, Winnie,” said Audrey, who occasionally thought fit to address Miss Ingate in the manner of the elder generation.  She drew Miss Ingate to the window.

Between the brown curtains Mozewater, the broad, shallow estuary of the Moze, was spread out glittering in the sunshine which could not get into the chilly room.  The tide was nearly at full, and the estuary looked like a mighty harbour for great ships; but in six hours it would be reduced to a narrow stream winding through mud flats of marvellous ochres, greens, and pinks.  In the hazy distance a fitful white flash showed where ocean waves were breaking on a sand-bank.  And in the foreground, against a disused Hard that was a couple of hundred yards lower down than the village Hard, a large white yacht was moored, probably the largest yacht that had ever threaded that ticklish navigation.  She was a shallow-draft barge-yacht, rigged like a Thames barge, and her whiteness and the glint of her brass, and the flicker of her ensign at the stern were dazzling.  Blue figures ran busily about on her, and a white-and-blue person in a peaked cap stood importantly at the wheel.

“She was on the mud last night,” said Audrey eagerly, “opposite the Flank buoy, and she came up this morning at half-flood.  I think they made fast at Lousey Hard, because they couldn’t get any farther without waiting.  They have a motor, and it must be their first trip this season.  I was on the dyke.  I wasn’t even looking at them, but they called me, so I had to go.  They only wanted to know if Lousey Hard was private.  Of course I told them it wasn’t.  It was a very middle-aged man spoke to me.  He must be the owner.  As soon as they were tied up he wanted to jump ashore.  It was rather awkward, and I just held out my hand to help him.  Father saw me from here.  I might have known he would.”

“Why!  It’s going off!” exclaimed Miss Ingate.

The yacht swung slowly round, held by her stern to the Hard.  Then the last hawser was cast off, and she floated away on the first of the ebb; and as she moved, her main-sail, unbrailed, spread itself out and became a vast pinion.  Like a dream of happiness she lessened and faded, and Lousey Hard was as lonely and forlorn as ever.

“But didn’t you explain to your father?” Miss Ingate demanded of Audrey.

“Of course I did.  But he wouldn’t listen.  He never does.  I might just as well have explained to the hall-clock.  He raged.  I think he enjoys losing his temper.  He said I oughtn’t to have been there at all, and it was just like me, and he couldn’t understand it in a daughter of his, and it would be a great shock to my poor mother, and he’d talked enough—­he should now proceed to action.  All the usual things.  He actually asked me who ‘the man’ was.”