For the second time the quartermaster cried aloud and stretched out a hand. But it was not Landon's sleeve which it reached, but Aylmer's—reached and gripped it while the two bodies reeled upon the crumbling edge and sent the flying blocks down to break into powder upon the solid flags below.
And then, where two had struggled, one alone remained and clung. Landon had gone. Like the blocks he lay thirty feet below—broken.
CHAPTER XXVIII
FATE SMILES AT LAST
A pall of mist and driving rain closed upon the city as evening fell, as if Nature flung a veil between herself and the handiwork of her passions. Through it the launch of the Diomède threaded the network of the shipping.
Warmly red against the ghost-like paintwork, the ports of The Morning Star beamed up out of the smother. Aylmer held up his hand. Silently, with stopped engines, the boat slid up to the accommodation ladder, and as silently Aylmer swung himself aboard.
With a gesture of farewell to the boat's crew and one of greeting to the sailor at the gangway head, he passed into the companion and went below. In the doorway of the saloon he halted.
Two figures sat at the table, a picture book open before them. Claire's arm was about her little nephew's shoulder. His face was turned up to hers, but his finger still pointed to the page which they had been studying.
"And was he brave, enormously brave?" he was asking. "As brave as—as Muhammed?"