A step forward, and again that timid, startled, fawn-like terror overcame her. "Oh, dear," she plaintively exclaimed, "the boat rocks; hold fast to me, sweetheart." And she halted with a swinging motion, as though her limbs were incapable of firmly sustaining her. With distended eyes. Jack stared at her. "Heavens!" he thought; "I cannot separate that poor mother from her child. I cannot do it. If Phil wants the reward he must take the child home himself." The thought was scarcely developed when the voice of his partner rang out from the other room, hoarse, disguised, and peremptory: "What's the matter with you? Separate them! Take the kid and turn the woman out." Then it was Virginia realized that she had two men to deal with instead of one. Undaunted, her courage arose to the occasion. She had come prepared for trouble of a most serious nature, and in her determination to succeed, it mattered little, now that she had shaken off the first trembling of fear, whether one or more men stood in her way. She stepped over close to Jack, bent forward and looked up sideways in his face, a magnetic fire scintillating from her eyes that seemed to pierce his inmost thought, and slowly drew his gaze to her. Under the spell Jack forgot his assumed character, for once he forgot to use the Dago dialect. "Don't look at me in that way; it was not all my work," he said, apologetically. He had spoken in plain English. Yet in Virginia's tensely excited frame of mind it passed unchallenged. "You acknowledge a share in it. And if you lay a hand on her child, I'll call down upon you the blasphemy of a madhouse." The art she employed to play upon his heightened imagination was intensely eloquent, and exquisitely enacted. On the impulse of the moment the threat served to unnerve him completely and had Jack been the only one to deal with, their escape at that moment would have been certain. A prey to his own secret superstition, though openly ridiculed theosophy, Jack stood spellbound, his fear distorted by the influence of the liquor he had drunk. True, Rutley had braced him some, but Virginia threw about him a glow of such awesome consequences that he again weakened and unconsciously repeated under his breath: "The curse of a madhouse! Oh, I can't do it! I'm a bit human yet." Then came a second roar from Rutley, impatient and contemptuous. "Separate them, you chicken-hearted knave! Separate them, damn you, and be quick about it, too!" A slight jar at that moment struck the cabin. Jack came out of his semi-trance with a shudder and, recovering his nerve, seemed to be disgusted at his momentary weakness, and forthwith he attempted to get between the women and the cabin door, addressing the child: "A Daize a mus stay a dare. Yous a lak a me, eh a Daize?" "Wretch, stand back!" Virginia commanded. She realized that the supreme moment had come. Jack leered at her. Without further heed he addressed the child: