The new moon had come down, extraordinary in its earth-shine which Fleury explained. The _Jade_ was marking time, just making steerage headway, the breeze too light for good breathing.... To-night (as had happened a dozen times before on the other side of South America before the cold weather) Stackhouse had begun his story with, “It was a night like this----” As of old it was the tale of man and death, of the Stackhouse escape from death, sinuously impressing the Stackhouse courage and cleverness. Not that the story was without art; indeed, as usual, it was such a one as a man seldom leaves until the end; but Bellair had long since reached the moment of sufficiency. He had come to the end of his favourite author; had begun to see the mechanism and inventional methods of the workmanship. Vim was lost for the enactment of Stackhouse’s fiercer strength. The man was a concentrated fume of spirit, every tissue falsely braced, his very life identified with the life and heat of decay.... Alone, Bellair glanced about before going below. A breeze had slightly quickened the ship in the last hour. There may have been a dozen nights of equal mystery but this he appreciated more soundly and was grateful for freedom. His mind answered the beauty of it all ... something of this, he might be able to tell Bessie in a letter. The stars were far and tender; the air heavenly cool and soft, the night high, and the ship’s full white above, had something to do with angels--a dreamy spirit-haunt about it all. He would always see the _Jade_ so, as he would see the Captain in that wonderful forenoon of his emancipation--poor McArliss who had not been on deck for days. Twenty minutes later, with paper before him in his berth, Bellair was deep in the interpretation of his heart, when the _Jade_ struck the cupola of a coral castle, and hung there shivering for five seconds. It was like a suspension of the law of time. Bellair thought of Bessie, of every one on the ship, beginning with Fleury and the New Zealand woman, and ending with Captain McArliss and the owner’s Japanese wife. These latter two were strangely rolled into one, as their images came. He thought of the ship’s position somewhere in the great emptiness between the Strait of Magellan and Polynesia. He re-read the last line of the letter before him. It had to do with the real help he hoped to be in Bessie’s cause _within the year_. He heard the running and the hard-held voices on deck, and one great bellowing cry from Stackhouse. He knew now that all the tales were the low furies of fear; that the movement he had seen first in the eyes of the great animal were the movements of fear.... And then the _Jade_ slid off the reef with a rip more tragic than the strike. 5