The mother-ship shuddered. The Japanese woman passed the binnacle, holding something high in her hand. She was on her knees.... There was a flare and the face of McArliss--who had struck his match at last.... The _Jade_ seemed to go from them--a sheet of grey obscured the rail. The two who remained were netted there together, the red point of the cigarette flickered out.... The two boats were on the sea; the night, a serenity of starlight.... The sound of slobbering turned their eyes to Stackhouse, who was drinking from one of the large cans.... Fleury went to him, pressed the face from it, and placed the cans forward at the feet of the woman. His hand was sticky afterward, as if with blood, and he held it overside. PART FOUR THE OPEN BOAT 1 BELLAIR was athirst. The fact that he had taken a deep drink less than a half-hour before, did not prevail altogether against it. In the very presence of Stackhouse there was a psychological intensity of thirst. The master sat hunched and obscene in the stern of the boat, patting the wet folds of his shirt--a pure desire-body, afraid of death, afraid of thirst, afraid of the fear of thirst and death. Picturesqueness and personality were gone from him; romance and the strange culture of the man, for the eyes of Bellair; the old wonder, too, which the seas and the islands of the seas had given him. Bellair could not forget the ankles, the moving of those bare masses up and down, as Stackhouse had clung at the same time to the small boat and the gunwale of the _Jade_. What a poison to past tales--this present passion and method of self-salvation. He was less than a beast, in retaining the effigy of a man. Bellair turned to Fleury. Like swift pleasant rays in the dark, the last scenes of the main-deck recurred. Again he marvelled at the falsity of his first judgments, by which he had formerly set so much, and so complacently. It had seemed a fat face to him at first, a face out of true with the world, the face of an easy man who placates things as they are, because he was not trained to see the evil of them and give them fight. All that was remembered with difficulty, even for this moment of contrast. It would not come again. Fleury had stood up in the crisis, a man to tie to. He would never be the same again in look or action or intonation; as Stackhouse could never be the same. Fleury had risen and put on a princely dimension; the other had lost even that uncertain admirableness of gross animalism. The preacher was leaning forward toward the knees of the woman, talking to the babe. Bellair imagined its eyes wide-open and sober; certainly it was still. The mother’s face was partly turned away. Fleury said: “He is having his adventures. He will be a great man. He will have the world at his finger-tips, when he is as old as we are--and then his real work will begin. For when we know enough of the world, we turn to God.”