es, and Ingigerd dismissed Frederick most ungraciously. There was a
look of hatred in her glance. But scarcely was Frederick outside in the
fog with the knob of the door still in his hand, when it seemed to him as
if ropes and chains, the chains of an enslaved man, were dragging him
back to the girl's couch.

XXIV

"What is to become of me?" Frederick questioned himself. He scarcely
heard Hans Fuellenberg's jolly shout of greeting as the young man reeled
past. Hans Fuellenberg did not fail to observe whose door it was that
Frederick von Kammacher had just closed behind him, nor that, as he stood
there with the knob still in his hand, he seemed to be in a state of
indecision and absorption.

The siren was sending up its deafening roar. It was that wild, fearful,
ascending cry, as if torn from the breast of a monster bull, which he had
first heard on the tender. There was something menacing in it, and at the
same time something of an anxious warning. Frederick never heard it
without applying menace and warning to himself. Likewise, the driving
mist seemed to be a reflection of his soul; or his soul a reflection of
the driving mist and also of the vessel, as it struggled onward into the
unknown, unseeing and unseen. He stepped over to the railing and looked
straight down the ship's side. There he could tell with what tremendous
rapidity the _Roland_ was cleaving the water.

"Isn't man's courage utter madness?" he thought. Could any one, from
captain to the lowest sailor, prevent the propeller-shaft from snapping
at any moment? The screw was constantly rising and buzzing in the air.
Who could sight a vessel in time to prevent the collision that would
inevitably smash in the thin walls of the great hollow body? Who could
hope to avoid one of the many derelicts drifting in the fog almost
submerged? What would happen if the might of the waves were to hurl that
great lumped mass of wood and iron against the _Roland's_ side? What
would happen if the engines were to break down? If a boiler were to
prove unequal to the uninterrupted strain put upon it? Then, too,
icebergs were met with in those waters. And suppose the storm were to
grow worse.

The things that European civilisation has accomplished are tremendous.
The trouble is, the object to which the means are applied is not worthy
of the means. The how is great. The wherefore receives only a stammering
reply. So much is certain, that the life of the average man to