That was the point around which his memories clustered now, although nobody save himself was aware of it. Indeed, there had been a distinctly admiring note in this gentleman's voice, flat and unemotional as it was by habit, when he had climbed up the ladder and set foot on the deck of the _Kalkis_. "You were very cool," he had said. He had not been cool. There had been a moment, just after he had pulled that telegraph-handle, and the ship, instead of slowly gaining sternway and moving off into the turbulence of her wake, had given another inexplicable shudder, and the bows sank into a sudden deathlike solidity when he rang "stop," as though that noise and that shudder and that almost imperceptible subsidence had been her death-throe, the last struggle of her complicated and tatterdemalion career. That moment had settled the _Kalkis_ and it had nearly settled him, too. He had turned right round and seen the man at the wheel methodically passing the spokes through his hands, his eye on the ship's head, his ear alert for the word of command. Mr. Spokesly had seen this, and for an instant he had had a shocking impulse to run to the far side of the bridge and go over, into the water. A moment of invisible yet fathomless panic. Looking back at it, he had a vague impression of a glimpse into eternity--as though for that instant he had really died, slipping into an unsuspected crevice between the past and the future.... The man at the wheel was looking at him. He heard a voice, the voice of the helmsman, saying, "She don't steer," and the moment was past. He walked firmly to the side and looked down at the boat, and heard someone calling, "Where is your ladder?"