m that perhaps he would never have occasion to use that
box any more. The vividness of the thought checked him and for an
infinitesimal fraction of a second his fingers closed again on the small
object as though it had been the symbol of all these little habits that
chain us to the weary round of life. He released it at last, and letting
himself fall on the settee, listened for the first sounds of returning
wind.

Not yet. He heard only the wash of water, the heavy splashes, the dull
shocks of the confused seas boarding his ship from all sides. She would
never have a chance to clear her decks.

But the quietude of the air was startlingly tense and unsafe, like a
slender hair holding a sword suspended over his head. By this awful
pause the storm penetrated the defences of the man and unsealed his
lips. He spoke out in the solitude and the pitch darkness of the cabin,
as if addressing another being awakened within his breast.

"I shouldn't like to lose her," he said half aloud.

He sat unseen, apart from the sea, from his ship, isolated, as if
withdrawn from the very current of his own existence, where such freaks
as talking to himself surely had no place. His palms reposed on his
knees, he bowed his short neck and puffed heavily, surrendering to
a strange sensation of weariness he was not enlightened enough to
recognize for the fatigue of mental stress.

From where he sat he could reach the door of a washstand locker. There
should have been a towel there. There was. Good. . . . He took it out,
wiped his face, and afterwards went on rubbing his wet head. He towelled
himself with energy in the dark, and then remained motionless with the
towel on his knees. A moment passed, of a stillness so profound that
no one could have guessed there was a man sitting in that cabin. Then a
murmur arose.

"She may come out of it yet."

When Captain MacWhirr came out on deck, which he did brusquely, as
though he had suddenly become conscious of having stayed away too long,
the calm had lasted already more than fifteen minutes--long enough to
make itself intolerable even to his imagination. Jukes, motionless on
the forepart of the bridge, began to speak at once. His voice, blank and
forced as though he were talking through hard-set teeth, seemed to flow
away on all sides into the darkness, deepening again upon the sea.

"I had the wheel relieved. Hackett began to sing out that he was done.
He's lying in there alongside the steering