“Cut it--there’s plenty of time.... Leave it all to us.... I say, lean back. You’ve got a bath coming. Guess you’ve never been on a sick-list before. We can wait for the story.” Bellair did try to lean back. One by one, the sheathes of will power that he had integrated in the past ten days relaxed. It was strange to feel them go. They had come hard, and they were correspondingly slow to ease in their grip. He had to be told again and again--to be helped to rest. It was good to think that a man does not lose such hard-won strength more easily than it comes--that one, in fact, has to use the same force to relax with. It was all delightful, this friendliness, the ease of his body, and the giving--the giving into human arms of great kindliness, and the sense of the others being cared for similarly. They had fixed a berth for him, when he said: “You know we are to be together to-night. It was a compact between us----” The surgeon was out and in. It occurred to Bellair that he was attending the other two.... He repeated his wish to the surgeon about joining the others as soon as possible. “They’re all alike,” the latter said. “They’re all thinking about getting together again.... Good God, man, you’ve had ten days of steady company. You ought to sleep----” “It is a compact between us.... Is he--is he?” It came to Bellair that this man might be able to tell him the truth, but the surgeon was now at the door speaking to one of the Germans. He vanished without turning.... * * * * * They were together later in one of the empty cabins of the German liner, _Fomalhaut_, bound for Auckland; and only the American doctor came and went. The child was asleep in the berth beside Fleury. The two others sat near. The extraordinary moonlight of the night before, when Bellair had awakened to find the preacher at prayer, had left the spirit of its radiance upon Fleury’s face. It was there now--and such a different face from which his eyes, falsified by New York, had seen at first. This was the real Fleury--this lean, dark, white-toothed gamester, features touched by some immortal glow from that orient moon; whose smile and the quality of every word and gesture, had for him a gleam of inspiration and the nobility of tenderness. The man had risen in Fleury--that was the secret. And this that had risen in Fleury could not die. But the flesh was dying. Bellair had known it in the dusk while the steamer neared. He knew that the woman understood--from her face which leaned toward the berth continually, from the suffering in her eyes and the dilation of sensitive nostrils.... For ten days, as much as he could, Fleury had betrayed himself. Custodian of the food and water, he had served them well. And that day of the Stackhouse passing--if it were not all a hideous dream, as Bellair fancied at times--he had not given a balance of strength that had not returned, to fight off the will of the Intruder.