Caragh sat with his back to the saloon skylight, watching the cloud-shadows racing over the soft green Irish coast.  
Between him and it was a heaving space of dark blue water, crested here and there with gleaming white.
 
The gale of the night was blowing itself out, but the wind still sang against the spars that swung to and fro through a wider arc of the sky than most of the guests on board found compatible with an appearance at breakfast.
 
Woolly flocks of white cloud came up from the Atlantic, raced through the clear blue overhead, and huddled down together behind the land.
 
It was a day boisterous with the joy of life, but Caragh's face showed no appreciation of its quality. His chair slid forward and back with the rolling deck, but his eyes were fixed gloomily upon the green hills, and he paid no heed to his own movement.
 
His sombre absorption gave him the appearance of being affected by the floundering seas; but he never suffered from sea-sickness and was grateful to the gale for having cleared the deck of the ship's jovial company.
 
He wished to be by himself, and yet it was himself that he was most anxious to evade; it was from self-sickness that he was suffering.
 
He had spoken the truth in telling Laura Marton that the faith in Lettice Nevern's eyes was his one hope of deliverance. He believed, if he could respond to that, even with the honest dishonesty which alone was possible—if he could, as he told her, "make a good girl's dreams come true"—that he might in time build up for himself an artificial constancy, and so regain his self-esteem.
 
That hope seemed not too high, face to face with the woman who was doing her best to shatter it. It sustained him while he was fighting her fascination—successfully, as he told himself; while he was dragging his weakness in a wounded sort of triumph, out of her reach; while he was hurrying his things on board the day after.
 
But there, unluckily, his victory ended. Seated apathetically in a deck-chair on the Candia, watching the long coast slip by from Thanet to the Lizard, the leaden turmoil of the Channel, and then the clouded purples of the Kerry Hills, he learnt how superficial was his advantage, how deeply he was in bondage.
 
He had, indeed, got out from England, but he had brought so little of himself away that it seemed an impertinence to offer it to any woman in marriage. His heart—or at least what in such affairs is called the heart—and all those cravings of the body which go with the heart were, and would remain, in Laura Marten's keeping.
 
She was right in every boast of her dominion over him. She was the woman for whom he had not waited, of whom long ago he had despaired. The woman who could have satisfied him body and soul, absorbing his desires, inspiring his dreams.
 
No partiality in the past had persuaded him to imagine that of any woman he had admired. They were just what they were—dainty, lovely, brilliant, bewitching; but nothing more to him than to any one who had a taste for them.
 
But here at last was the woman made for him, mad for him: warm with that fugitive spirit of sense which was in her only and for him alone.
 
He knew that, though he knew not how he knew it, as certainly, as responsively as a lock knows the wards of its key.
 
It was as a key that she had entered him; and within him, at her moving, the levers of a secret life had stirred—a strange new complexity of being which no mortal influence had disturbed before.
 
She had revealed to him all that life had not yielded him, all that now it could never yield, a correlation undreamed of between man and woman.
 
And she had come curiously too late. That was his bitterness. He would have sacrificed for her every other allegiance of the past, save this one which brought him no pleasure. From Lettice Nevern he could only come to her as a man debased for ever in his own esteem. Nothing could excuse such a betrayal, nothing could redeem him after it was done.
 
Happiness with the woman he must marry was out of the question; but happiness without her was now for him equally uncompassable. He had a choice only between two sorts of despair. Under such conditions it seemed improbable that he would prove a very cheerful companion, but such predictions were with Caragh especially difficult. His humour was always available for his own misfortunes, and in this case his fortune was too deplorable not to be concealed.
 
Since it entirely absorbed his unconscious thoughts his attention always seemed preoccupied; an abstraction which lent however, an agreeable effect of detachment from ordinary worries.
 
He was, perhaps for that reason, the serenest member of the ship's company, and the one most obligingly at the service of other men's affairs.
 
But on this windy morning he was allowed to reflect on his own adversities, till a shout from forward called his eyes towards the shore.
 
The Candia had just cleared a long headland and opened the narrow bay beyond, where, canted slightly to starboard, lay a big three-master, the rags of her royals and a staysail slapping the wind, the long blue rollers breaking against her in spouts of foam.
 
She was evidently on the rocks, and yet an impracticable distance from the forbidding shore, which swept in a purple skirting of cliff about her. Dark figures could be seen moving on the bridge and in the rigging, and the flutter of a woman's skirts could be made out against the shrouds.
 
The Candia stood in towards the shore, and her decks were soon crowded with excited passengers, waiting anxiously the lowering of a boat and speculating on the way in which a rescue would be attempted.
 
A line of colour ran up to the barque's peak, and was answered presently by a signal from the steamer; then the engines slowed and stopped.
 
The Candia rolled ponderously in the long swell while another signal was exchanged the splash of the lead becoming suddenly audible in the silence.
 
The vessels were now not more than five hundred yards apart, and every detail could be seen upon the wreck.
 
Save for the few figures on the bridge and poop, all those on board her had taken to the rigging, as the sloping decks were swept by the heavier waves.
 
Several women could be seen on her, and the glass showed them to be lashed to the shrouds, and apparently exhausted.
 
Each fresh evidence of urgency increased the impatience on board the Candia. Yet no scheme of assistance seemed in progress. The engines were reversed, the Candia backed in a trifle closer, the roar of the breakers began to make a continuous moil in the air, but the boats hung undisturbed on their davits.
 
The captain was on the bridge and could not be questioned, but presently Sir Anthony Palmer, who as chairman of the Candia's company was superintending the cruise, was seen coming aft with a grave face.
 
He said, in answer to a volley of questions, that no help could be given till the sea went down and the tide had risen. A ledge of rocks lay between the two ships, already defined occasionally by a thrash of foam over which no boat could pass.
 
The stranger must have been carried across it at high water some hours earlier, had struck on a second ledge between that and the shore, and was now equally cut off from succour from the sea or from the land.
 
Rockets were at once suggested, but Sir Anthony explained that the distance was too great for a rocket line to cover, and that the tides precluded the floating in of a buoy. Nothing could be done but wait and pray that the vessel might not break up during the next twelve hours.
 
Some one asked if she were likely to, and Sir Anthony admitted that she had signalled her fears of such an event.
 
"Couldn't some one swim to her?" said a voice from the taffrail.
 
Sir Anthony shook his head; to cross the ledge with the break of water on it at present would be to court almost certain death.
 
There was a pause; all eyes were turned towards the reef, where the vessel lay in the gay morning, like some masquerade of death, between the lovely colours of the sea and shore.
 
Caragh leant back in his chair with a yawn, and looked up at the sky.
 
"I'll take a line to her," he said placidly.
 
The backs of the heads between him and the ship's side became suddenly a ring of faces, and the first stupidity of surprise was expressed by the question, "Can you swim?"
 
Caragh looked at them with no expression of interest, and Sir Anthony shook his head.
 
"You couldn't do it, my dear fellow," he protested; "you couldn't do it!"
 
"Perhaps not," said Maurice; "but I can have a try." Sir Anthony's hands and head shook in voluble negation.
 
"The captain wouldn't permit it for a moment," he asserted.
 
"Well," said Caragh, "of course the captain can refuse me the use of a line, but he can't, without being very unpleasant, prevent my going overboard."
 
There was an instant's pause, and then the group about the chair burst into simultaneous suggestion and advice.
 
Caragh was slapped on the shoulder; his previous performances in the water were demanded; encouragement and remonstrance were alternately tendered, and everything obvious on the situation was said.
 
"I'm not a professional performer," he explained at last, "but I can keep afloat as long as most men, and if I'm ready to take the risks of a swim, I don't think it should be any one's business to stop me."
 
This met a varied response, and with a general acclamation for the captain the speakers were moving forward when that officer appeared, looking for Sir Anthony, who at once put the case to him.
 
The captain, with a glance at Caragh still seated in his chair, dismissed the matter with a shrug of his shoulders. But he had miscalculated the passiveness of the man before him.
 
Caragh got quietly upon his feet, looked across the water at the wreck, and then turned to the captain.
 
"If you can't spare me a line to take on board her, I'll have to bring you back one of hers," he said.
 
"I forbid you to leave the ship," replied the other briefly.
 
"Of course you can do that," said Caragh, looking again across the sea, "but it won't make a pretty story if those poor devils are drowned under our eyes."
 
At that moment a sailor brought the signalling slate aft to the captain, who looked glum and handed it to Sir Anthony.
 
"Tide's leaving her," he explained.
 
"Her back is breaking, is that it?" asked Sir Anthony.
 
The captain nodded.
 
"She won't hold together long after that?"
 
"Probably not," said the captain.
 
Caragh's offer found none but backers when the gravity of the signal was made known.
 
The captain still protested its insanity, but he was persuaded in the end to withdraw his prohibition and do what was possible to start the venture with the best chances of success.
 
The ship was to be taken a little nearer the southern shore to give the swimmer what help could be had from the tide, and the lightest line on board was prepared while Caragh went below to strip, accompanied by a couple of admirers, who insisted on the necessity of his being oiled before entering the water.
 
As he never expected to come out of it alive he had no wish for oil, but did desire urgently to be left alone for the next few moments.
 
He had made his offer from no surge of sympathy, no flush of valour. He was not braver probably than most of those on board, nor cared twopence more than they for the fate of the derelicts. His proposal was but the climax of his morning thoughts. He could endure himself no longer. The wretchedness of his passion would bear no further the thought of the girl he was on his way to meet. Every instant in the day-time, and night after night in his dreams, that splendid presence possessed him to which he had for ever said good-bye. And in the fever of that possession he could not think of a wife. Yet of what else could he think, as every hour brought her nearer, and made sharper for him the shame of her exultant face, and the reproach in her confiding arms. Never for an instant had his tenderness faltered. She was dearer to him than a sister; dearer by all she had given him, by all she was prepared to give; dearer above all by what she believed him to have given her.
 
And it was his tenderness that made unendurable the treachery of his faithfulness, the loyalty of the lie which was to make them one.
 
It was at the worst of such a reflection that death suddenly appeared to him as the escape, the release for them both; for the pledge which he had given and for her trust in his word.
 
Death, a high and honour............