always to the Berenice moving away up the Asia passage, so cautiously that between whiles she seemed to be drifting; but always moving, with the smoke blown level from her buff-coloured funnels, with clean white sides and clean white ensign, and here and there a sparkle of sunlight on rail or gun-breech or torpedo-tube.  She was bound on a three-years’ cruise; and Gilbart, who happened to know this and was besides something of a sentimentalist, detected pathos in this departure on a festival morning.  It seemed to him—­as she swung round her stern and his quick eye caught the glint of her gilded name with the muzzle of her six-inch gun on the platform above, foreshortened in the middle of its white screen like a bull’s-eye in a target—­it seemed to him that this holiday throng took little heed of the three hundred odd men so silently going forth to do England’s work and fight her battles.  On her deck yesterday afternoon he had shaken hands and parted with a friend, a stoker on board, and had seen some pitiful good-byes.  His friend Casey, to be sure, was unmarried—­an un-amiable man with a cynical tongue—­with no one to regret him and no disposition to make a fuss over a three-years’ exile.  But at the head of the ship’s ladder Gilbart had passed through a group of red-eyed women, one or two with babies at the breast.  It was not a pretty sight:  one poor creature had abandoned herself completely, and rocked to and fro holding on by the bulwarks and bellowing aloud.  This and a vision of dirty wet handkerchiefs haunted him like a physical sickness.

Gilbart considered himself an Imperialist, read his newspaper religiously, and had shown great loyalty as secretary of a local sub-committee at the time of the Queen’s Jubilee, in collecting subscriptions among the dockyardsmen.  Habitually he felt a lump in his throat when he spoke of the Flag.  His calling—­that of lay-assistant and auxiliary preacher (at a pinch) to a dockyard Mission—­perhaps encouraged this surface emotion; but by nature he was one of those who need to make a fuss to feel they are properly patriotic.  To his thinking every yacht in the Sound should have dipped her flag to the Berenice.

Surely even a salute of guns would not have been too much.  But no:  that is the way England dismisses her sons, without so much as a cheer!

He felt ashamed of this cold send-off; ashamed for his countrymen.  “What do they know or care?” he asked himself, fastening his scorn on the backs of an unconscious group of country-people who had raced one another uphill from an excursion steamer and halted panting and laughing half-way up the slope.  It irritated him the more when he thought of Casey’s pale, derisive face.  He and Casey had often argued about patriotism; or rather he had done the arguing while Casey sneered.  Casey was a stoker, and knew how fuel should be applied.