"Has one of the life-helmets ever saved a life?"

It was Claire who asked the question in her low, vibrating voice.

Commander Dupre turned to her, and he flushed under his sunburn. It was
the first time she had spoken to him that day.

"No, never," he answered shortly. And then, after a pause, he added,
"the conditions in which these life-helmets could be utilized only occur
in one accident in a thousand----"

"Still, they would have saved our comrades in the _Lutin_," objected
Lieutenant Paritot.

The _Lutin_? There was a moment's silence. The evocation of that
tricksy sprite, the Ariel of French mythology, whose name, by an
ironical chance, had been borne by the most ill-fated of all submarine
craft, seemed to bring the shadow of death athwart them all.

Madeleine Baudoin felt a sudden tremor of retrospective fear. She was
glad she had not remembered the _Lutin_ when she was sitting, eating
ices, and exchanging frivolous, chaffing talk with Lieutenant Paritot in
that chamber of little ease, the drum-like interior of the _Neptune_,
where not even she, a small woman, could stand upright.

"Well, well! We must not keep you from your _dejeuner_!" she cried,
shaking off the queer, disturbing sensation. "I have to thank you
for--shall I say a very interesting experience? I am too honest to say
an agreeable one!"

She shook hands with Commander Dupre and Lieutenant Paritot, the
officers who had accompanied her on what had been, now that she looked
back on it, perhaps a more perilous adventure than she had realized.

"You're coming with me, Claire?" She looked at her sister--it was a
tender, anxious, loving look; Madeleine Baudoin had been the eldest, and
Claire de Wissant the youngest, of a Breton admiral's family of three
daughters and four sons; they two were devoted to one another.

Claire shook her head. "I came to tell you that I can't lunch with you
to-day," she said slowly. "I promised I would be back by half-past
twelve."

"Then we shall not meet till to-morrow?"

Claire repeated mechanically, "No, not till to-morrow, dear Madeleine."

"May I row you home, madame?" Lieutenant Paritot asked Madeleine
eagerly.

"Certainly, _mon ami_."

And so, a very few minutes later, Claire de Wissant and Commander Dupre
were left alone together--alone, that is, save for fifty inquisitive, if
kindly, pairs of eyes which saw them from every part of the bay.

At last she held out her hand. "Good-bye, then, till t