Far away in the black void a ship began to fire star-shells.
As the awed throng on the moving liner's decks gazed out across the night, the doomed cruiser split slowly amidships, visibly, showing the vivid crack of her scarlet, jagged wound. For a second or two she fairly vomited hell-fire; lay there spouting it out in great crimson gouts; then she crashed skyward into incandescent fragments like a single gigantic bomb, and thunderous blackness blotted out sea and sky once more.
CHAPTER X
FORCE
He knocked sharply at the stateroom door and called, "Karen! It is I! Open!"
She flung open the door, satchel in hand, and he entered, closed the door, relocked it, and dropped down on the lounge, staring at space.
"Kervyn! What is it?" she asked faintly, one hand against her breast.
"It is all right," he said—"as far as we are concerned—for the present, anyway. God! I can't realize it—I can't get over it——"