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struggling George towards the barge. Eric helped them aboard.
    Ten minutes had passed and still George had not recovered. With Black Bart safely half-a-mile behind, still cursing fearfully, George was in no hurry to recover. His head was pillowed on Mary’s lap; a very comfortable pillow he thought. Besides, he could hear his own cruiser purring alongside and he did not feel like meeting Eric’s accusing eye.
    He stirred, experimentally, and his eyebrows fluttered open. The redhead still sat motionless on the deck, oblivious of her soaking clothes, mechanically steering with one hand. She was whispering, ‘George, George, oh George’ in a manner highly pleasing to George’s ears: and her blue eyes, usually so hostile and snapping, were now misted over with an anxiety and a soft concern.
    But, he thought in a delicious drowsiness, I must remember to warn Eric about the medal. Mary must never know—well, at least not till later. For George really was the holder of nothing less than the George Medal. It had been given himfor an amazing feat of personal survival when his fighter had crashed in the Mediterranean, eight miles off the Libyan coast. He had been wounded, dazed, weak from the loss of blood and he ought to have died. But George had reached land.
    And he had swum every foot of the way.

The Arandora Star
    The Arandora Star had indeed fallen upon evil days. Less than a year had elapsed since the ending of her great days, the proud days when the fluttering of the Blue Star house flag at her masthead had signalled in a score of harbours all over the world the stately arrival of one of the elite of the British Mercantile Marine—a luxury cruise liner on her serene and regal way round the better ports of the seven seas.
    Less than a year had elapsed since she had taken aboard her last complement of financially select passengers, wrapped them in a silken cocoon of luxury and impeccable service and transported them painlessly north to the Norwegian fjords in search of the summer sun or south to bask in the warmth of the blue Caribbean skies. Deck games, soft music, cinema shows, dancing to the ship’s band, the tinkling of ice in tall frosted glasses, the unobtrusive but omnipresent white-jacketedstewards—there had been no lack of every last comfort and convenience which might in any way conduce to the perfect shipboard holiday atmosphere of relaxation and romance.
    Less than a year had elapsed, but now all that was gone. The change was great. The relaxation and romance were no more. Neither were the bands, the bars, the deck games, the dancing under the stars.
    Greater even was the change in the ship itself. The hull, upper-works and funnel that had once so gaily reflected their colours in the millpond waters of fjords and Mediterranean ports were now covered in a dull coat of neutral grey. The public rooms had been stripped of their expensive furnishings, panelling and draperies, cabins and staterooms altered and fitted with crude metal bunks to accommodate twice—and in some cases four times—as many passengers as formerly.
    But the greatest change of all was in the nature of the passengers, and the purpose of their voyage. Where once there had been a few hundred affluent Britons, there were now no fewer than 1,600 far from affluent German and Italian internees and prisoners of war: and they were going not in search of the sun, but to internment camps in Canada for the duration of the war.
    These internees, composed mostly of British-resident civilians and captured German seamen, were the lucky ones. They were leaving the bleakausterity of blacked-out and rationed England for the comfort and comparative plenty of North America. True, they were going to be locked up and guarded for months or even years, and it was going to be a dull and boring war for them: but at least they would be well clad, well fed—and above all safe.
    Or they would have been. Unfortunately, both for the