arm, laughing; but
down on the steerage deck there rose a cry which wasn't laughter.

"Child overboard!" someone screamed. And I realised with a horrid
feeling like suffocation, that a tiny boy down below, who had climbed
up on the rail to watch the dancing, was missing.

It was a woman who had screamed, and everything followed so quickly
that my mind was confused, as if a whirlwind had rushed through it and
blown all the impressions on top of one another, in a heap. There was a
babel of voices on the steerage deck, more cries, and shouts, and
screams, and people surged in a solid wave toward the rail to look
over. But out of that wave sprang one figure separating itself from the
other atoms; and then I heard myself give a cry, too, for the man who
had been in my thoughts had thrown off his coat and vaulted over the
rail into the sea.

"Jove! he'll be caught by the propeller!" I heard somebody near me say.

I turned sick. The thought of his life being crushed out while we all
looked on, helpless, was awful. The sea was terrible enough in
itself--the great, wide, merciless, blue water, which sparkled so
coldly, and laughed in its power--but to be crunched up by the jaws of
a monster--I shut my eyes, and couldn't open them until I heard men
saying the strong wind to starboard might save him. I believe I must
have been unconsciously praying, and my hands were clasped so tightly
together that afterwards my fingers ached.

People on our deck made a rush towards the stern, on the port side, for
the ship had been steaming so fast that already we were forging away
from the child who had fallen and the man who had jumped after him.
Sally and I were carried along with the rush. She seized me by the
hand, but we didn't speak a word. If dear friends, instead of two
strangers in a far remote sphere of life, had been in deadly danger, I
don't think the sickness at my heart could have been worse. I would
have given years if at that moment I could have had the magical power
to stop the ship instantly, with one wave of my hand.

But it was being stopped, by another power than mine. I felt the deck
shiver under my feet, like a thoroughbred horse, pulled on to his
haunches. The accident had been seen from the bridge; an order to stop
the ship had been telegraphed down to the engine-room, and obeyed.
Still, when Sally Woodburn and I had been carried by the crowd far
enough towards the stern to look out over the blue wilderness of wat