“Are the children lying down, Mrs Stannard?” asked Lestrange, almost breathless from the excitement and exertion of the last few minutes. 

 The woman glanced at him with frightened eyes. He looked like the very herald of disaster. 

 “For if they are, and you have undressed them, then you must put their clothes on again. The ship is on fire, Mrs Stannard.” 

 “Good God, sir!” 

 “Listen!” said Lestrange. 

 From a distance, thin, and dreary as the crying of sea-gulls on a desolate beach, came the clanking of the pumps. 

 

 

 CHAPTER IV 

 AND LIKE A DREAM DISSOLVED 

 Before the woman had time to speak a thunderous step was heard on the companion stairs, and Le Farge broke into the saloon. The man’s face was injected with blood, his eyes were fixed and glassy like the eyes of a drunkard, and the veins stood on his temples like twisted cords. 

 “Get those children ready!” he shouted, as he rushed into his own cabin. “Get you all ready—boats are being swung out and victualled. H--l! where are those papers?” 

 They heard him furiously searching and collecting things in his cabin—the ship’s papers, accounts, things the master mariner clings to as he clings to his life; and as he searched, and found, and packed, he kept bellowing orders for the children to be got on deck. Half mad he seemed, and half mad he was with the knowledge of the terrible thing that was stowed amidst the cargo. 

 Up on deck the crew, under the direction of the first mate, were working in an orderly manner, and with a will, utterly unconscious of there being anything beneath their feet but an ordinary cargo on fire. The covers had been stripped from the boats, kegs of water and bags of biscuit placed in them. The dinghy, smallest of the boats and most easily got away, was hanging at the port quarter-boat davits flush with the 

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