save to cast pieces of spar and
plank overboard in the faint hope that some one of them might come in
the drowning man's way and enable him to keep afloat till daylight, if
by any chance his purpose of self-slaughter--for so it seemed to me--had
changed with his souse into the water. The night was pitchy black, and
the waves were running a tremendous pace, so that there really seemed to
be little likelihood of the strongest swimmer keeping himself long
afloat; but we did our best and hoped our hardest, even those of us who,
like myself, disliked and distrusted Cornelys Jensen profoundly.

Though Lancelot said little to Marjorie beyond the bare news of what
had happened I could see that he took the disappearance of Jensen and
that little scrawl we found in his cabin badly to heart. He was
convinced at once that Jensen had committed suicide, driven thereto by
the suspicions that we had formed of him; and, indeed, though I tried to
console Lancelot as well as I could, it did look very like it, and I
must confess that I felt a little guilty. For though I still thought
that the grounds upon which I had formed my suspicions of the man were
reasonable grounds, and justified all my apprehensions, still I could
not resist an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps, after all, I might
have misjudged the man, and that in any case I was the instrument--the
unwitting instrument, but still the instrument none the less--of sending
a fellow-creature before his Maker with the stigma of self-slaughter
upon his soul. So certainly Lancelot and I passed a very unhappy night,
what there was left of it; and when the dawn came we scanned the sea
anxiously in the faint hope that we might see something of the missing
man. But, though the sea was far quieter than it had been for many
hours, there was no trace of any floating body upon it, and it became
only too clear to our minds that, for some cause or other, Cornelys
Jensen had indeed killed himself. I could only imagine that the man was
really crazed, although we did not dream of such a thing, and that the
perils and privations through which we had passed, and against which he
seemed to bear such a bold front, had in fact completed the unhinging of
his wits, and that my accusations, acting upon a weakened mind, had
driven him in his frenzy to destroy himself. To be quite candid, though
I was sufficiently sorry for the man, I was still dogged enough in my
own opinion of his character as to think that