t up, his face--for the first time
in his life--had a pink flush--perhaps of triumph.

He slipped the key under the pillow again, avoiding to glance at Jimmy,
who had not moved. He turned his back squarely from the bunk, and
started to the door as though he were going to walk a mile. At his
second stride he had his nose against it. He clutched the handle
cautiously, but at that moment he received the irresistible impression
of something happening behind his back. He spun round as though he had
been tapped on the shoulder. He was just in time to see Wait's eyes
blaze up and go out at once, like two lamps overturned together by a
sweeping blow. Something resembling a scarlet thread hung down his chin
out of the corner of his lips--and he had ceased to breathe.

Donkin closed the door behind him gently but firmly. Sleeping men,
huddled under jackets, made on the lighted deck shapeless dark mounds
that had the appearance of neglected graves. Nothing had been done all
through the night and he hadn't been missed. He stood motionless and
perfectly astounded to find the world outside as he had left it; there
was the sea, the ship--sleeping men; and he wondered absurdly at it, as
though he had expected to find the men dead, familiar things gone for
ever: as though, like a wanderer returning after many years, he had
expected to see bewildering changes. He shuddered a little in the
penetrating freshness of the air, and hugged himself forlornly. The
declining moon drooped sadly in the western board as if withered by
the cold touch of a pale dawn. The ship slept. And the immortal
sea stretched away immense and hazy, like the image of life, with a
glittering surface and lightless depths. Donkin gave it a defiant
glance and slunk off noiselessly as if judged and cast out by the august
silence of its might.

Jimmy's death, after all, came as a tremendous surprise. We did not know
till then how much faith we had put in his delusions. We had taken his
chances of life so much at his own valuation that his death, like the
death of an old belief, shook the foundations of our society. A
common bond was gone; the strong, effective and respectable bond of a
sentimental lie. All that day we mooned at our work, with suspicious
looks and a disabused air. In our hearts we thought that in the matter
of his departure Jimmy had acted in a perverse and unfriendly manner.
He didn't back us up, as a shipmate should. In going he took away with
himself