She now stood at the bulwarks looking across that shadowy expanse, marvelling at the change which had come about within so short a space of time.
“My life—it is my life,” she sighed. “A short time ago it was made luminous by love; but now—ah! now——”
She turned away with another sigh and walked back to her deck chair. She was in the act of picking up her cushions from the seat when, glancing astern, she was amazed on becoming aware of the fact that she was not alone at that part of the ship. She saw two figures standing together on the raised poop that covered the steam-steering apparatus at the farthest curve of the stern.
She was amazed. She asked herself how it was possible that she had failed to see them when she had looked astern a few minutes before. The figures were of course shadowy in the strange mistily luminous atmosphere, but they were sufficiently conspicuous in the place where they stood to make her confident that, had they been there five minutes before, she would have seen them.
She stood there wondering, the cushion which she had picked up hanging from her hand, who the men were that had come so mysteriously before her eyes an hour after the last of the passengers had, as she thought, descended to their berths.
She could not recognise either of them. They were separated from her by half the length of the stern.
Suddenly she gave a little gasp. The cushion which she had held dropped from her hand, for one of the figures made a movement, turning his back to the low poop rail over which he had been leaning, and that moment was enough, even in the pale light, to allow of her recognising the features of Jack Norgate.
She gave a little cry of mingled wonder and joy, but before she had taken even a step toward that tableau, she had shrieked out; for in the second that separated her exclamations, the figure whom she saw in front of the one she knew had sprung upon him, causing him to overbalance himself on the low rail against which he was leaning, and to disappear over the side.
She shrieked and sprang forward; at that moment the second figure seemed to fade away and to vanish into nothingness before her eyes. She staggered diagonally across the deck astern, but before she had taken more than a dozen blind steps her foot caught in the lashing of the tarpaulin which was spread over a pile of deck chairs, and she fell forward. One of the officers on watch, who had heard her cry, swung himself down from the roof of the deckhouse and ran to her help.
“Good God! Miss Compton, what has happened anyway?” he cried.