"Surely you're going to try for this extraordinary prize?" she cried. "I'm sure that you could easily devise something which would gain the old lady's legacy."
"I, madame?" he answered with a start, almost as if he were wrenching himself free from some deep abstraction. "I should not think of trying to do such a thing! It would be a mere waste of time. Besides, there is no real risk—no risk that we are not prepared to run." He looked proudly round at the eager, laughing faces of the youngsters who were, till to-morrow night, still under his orders.
"The old lady meant very well," he went on, and for the first time since he had stepped out of the conning tower Commander Dupré smiled. "And I hope with all my heart that some poor devil will get her money! But I think I may promise you that it will not be an officer in the submarine service. We are too busy, we have too many really important things to do, to worry ourselves about life-saving appliances. Why, the first thing we should do if pressed for room would be to throw our life-helmets overboard!"
"Has one of the life-helmets ever saved a life?"
It was Claire who asked the question in her low, vibrating voice.
Commander Dupré turned to her, and he flushed under his sunburn. It was the first time she had spoken to him that day.
"No, never," he answered shortly. And then, after a pause, he added, "the conditions in which these life-helmets could be utilized only occur in one accident in a thousand——"
"Still, they would have saved our comrades in the Lutin," objected Lieutenant Paritot.
The Lutin? There was a moment's silence. The evocation of that tricksy sprite, the Ariel of French mythology, whose name, by an ironical chance, had been borne by the most ill-fated of all submarine craft, seemed to bring the shadow of death athwart them all.
Madeleine Baudoin felt a sudden tremor of retrospective fear. She was glad she had not remembered the Lutin when she was sitting, eating ices, and exchanging frivolous, chaffing talk with Lieutenant Paritot in that chamber of little ease, the drum-like interior of the Neptune, where not even she, a small woman, could stand upright.