gangway in the social hall beside the fair-faced man and they saw Lavelle smash him to the deck with a blow of his fist.

Looking up from the deck below Emily Granville saw this, too, and, terrified, fled from succoring hands. She saw only a fiend at work.

"Twenty minutes! No longer! Lights—ten minutes!" shouted the quartermaster struggling to his side.

"What about the steerage?"

"Gone like rats! Whole bow's gone!"

He pantomimed him to take charge of a boat forward on the starboard side. A grimy engineer came through the crowd and reported. Others came and accepted his mastership—men who needed but to be told what to do to find their bearings and run in them.

Like a flame he moved upon that deck. Who he might be few knew, but wheresoever he went disorder became order and the spirits of brave men grew stronger and smiled at death as upon a friend. Like another self—the shadow of the flame—there moved Chang whither he went, striking as he struck and lifting up as he lifted up.

Of a sudden Lavelle saw Emily Granville standing in the port gangway of the smoke-room house, alone, hesitant, terror-stricken. She saw him and as he ran to her with open arms she drew back and then, remembering that he had but turned away from a boat in which she had seen him put a little girl, who cried that God must be upon the sea, she paused in her flight.

In that instant the guards whom Lavelle had stationed there were swept away by a yellow horde from below. It burst out of the gangway and engulfed him in its tide.

There was an explosion as of a cannon fired in the distance where another bulkhead gave way. The ship lurched with a downward twisting motion. The lights flickered and went out and the pregnant darkness burst in disorder and panic.

CHAPTER VI

Dawn suddenly broke upon a sea snarling under the lash of a heavy northeasterly. Emily Granville, her eyes pressed against the blackness, saw it as from a mountain peak. The next instant she was hurtling, twisting downward through space, sightless; her breath stopped.

The sensation of falling ceased. There was a hardly perceptible pause amid a stinging smother of spray and then came the sensation of being 

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