he wall of fog came in answer distant
signals full of a mingled mockery and hope to the people waiting there.

But for John Coxeter the drama of his own soul took precedence of that
going on round him. Had he been alone he would have shared to the full
the awful, exasperating feeling of being trapped, of there being nothing
to be done, which possessed all the thinking minds about him. But he was
not alone----

Nan, lying on his breast, seemed to pour virtue into him--to make him
extraordinarily alive. Never had he felt death, extinction so near, and
yet there seemed to be something outside himself, a spirit informing,
uplifting, and conquering the flesh.

Perceptions, sympathies, which had lain dormant during the whole of his
thirty-nine years of life, now sprang into being. His imagination
awoke. He saw that it was this woman, now standing, with such complete
trust in the niceness of his honour, heart to heart with him, who had
made the best of that at once solitary and companioned journey which we
call life. He had thought her to be a fool; he now saw that, if a fool,
she had been a divine fool, ever engaged while on her pilgrimage with
the only things that now mattered. How great was the sum of her
achievement compared with his. She had been a beacon diffusing light and
warmth; he a shadow among shadows. If to-night he were engulfed in the
unknown, for so death was visioned by John Coxeter, who would miss him,
who would feel the poorer for his sudden obliteration?

* * * * *

Coxeter came back into the present; he looked round him, and for the
first time he felt the disabling clutch of physical fear. The life-belts
were being given out, and there came to him a horrid vision of the
people round him as they might be an hour hence, drowned, heads down,
legs up, done to death by those monstrous yellow bracelets which they
were now putting on with such clumsy, feverish eagerness.

He was touched on the arm, and a husky voice, with which he was by now
familiar, said urgently, "Mr. Coxeter--see, I've brought your bag out
of the saloon." The man whose name he knew to be Victor Munich was
standing at his elbow. "Look here, don't take offence, Mr. Coxeter, I
think better of the----" he hesitated--"the life-saver that you've got
in this bag of yours than you do. I'm willing to give you a fancy price
for it--what would you say to a thousand pounds? I daresay I shan't have
occasion to use it,