"We have every chance now," he said very gently, bending over the pillow--"barring a wireless to some British guard-ship. Don't give way yet, Karen." He laid a cool, firm hand over hers and tried to speak jestingly. "Wait until there's no danger at all before you go all to pieces," he whispered.
As he bent above her, he became conscious of the warm fragrance of tears. But no sound came, not a quiver. And after a while he went over to the sofa and sat down, staring at the locked satchel on the floor, vaguely aware that the boat was in steady motion.
"You know," he said, forcing a laugh, "you needn't say it when we're alone--except for practice."
"Did you know that official named Mitchell?"
The funnel smoke blew low, burying the afterdecks, and a hurricane of scud and spindrift swept everything forward, drenching the plunging steamer to the bridge. Stanchions, davits, hatches were all a-dip, decks a-wash, and the Dutch ensign whipping aloft in a thick grey sky that seemed to speed astern as though in chase of the heaving grey waste of waters that fled away beneath.
Here and there a trawler tossed and rocked; lean, melancholy wanderers on the face of the waters; twice the raking stacks of destroyers, smothered in foam, dashed eastward running full speed on some occult trail twixt sky and sea.
The grey world grew duller, duller; one by one the blinding searchlights on coast-guard ships broke out, sweeping sky and ocean as though in desperate appeal to the God above and in menacing warning to the devils that lurked below.
For they said the North Sea was full of them; legions of them tossed broadcast from the black hell of some human mind. And beneath them, deeper, lying as still as death on the Channel's floor, waited the human submarines in unseen watery depths--motionless, patient, awaiting the moment to strike.
Night came; the white level glare of searchlights flooded the steamer, lingered, shifted, tossed their dazzling arms heavenward as though imploring the Most High, then swept unseen horizons where the outermost waters curve with the curving globe.
Only one light burned in the stateroom, but the port was not covered.
Karen lay on the bed, unstirring save for a slight tremor of her shoulders now and then. Her brown hair, half loosened, had fallen in thick burnished curls on the pillow; one hand covered her eyes, palm outward. Under it the vivid lips, scarcely parted, rested on each other in a troubled curve.