Watching her partner drew Emily's attention from the Daphne. A warning slat of the weather leech of the to'galluns'l brought her eyes back to the bark and the compass. She had just succeeded in getting the vessel on her course of northeast again, when a roar with a shriek whistling through it came bursting aft. A cloud of steam poured from the engine room door.
Shrieking Paul's name, Emily paused but a second when no answer came. She became a flame of action. With the quickness of thought and the instinct of his training guiding her hands, she snapped the wheel into its beckets, let the spanker sheet go by the run and, leaping forward, cast the halyards off their pin.
Only belching steam answered her cry of Paul. Into it she hurled herself. It flung her back. She became as a tigress at the repulse. She was not to be denied. Instinct brought her to her hands and knees. It told her to go in under the scalding vapor. Just inside the door she found her own and snatched him into the life-giving air.
When Paul awoke to consciousness fifteen minutes later it was to find the face of the gold woman bending over him. He put up his arms and drew her face down against his hot lips and held it there.
"You, you," he murmured, and he found the precious lips which had kissed him again and again in his unconsciousness. They answered him as if they would breathe the strength of immortal life into his form.
"Not even death can take you from me!" she cried, and started up savagely. She might have expected to find the grim specter himself to grapple at her side.
"Not even—death——"
Lavelle sighed and his eyes closed in a seeming weariness of pain. His arms fell from her neck.
"Oh, God, you mustn't take him from me! You must not!"
It was an appeal, a command, a challenge of defiance. The cry with which she sent it heavenward pierced above the roar of the steam and the warring sails and hamper above.