I looked up at the moon and beheld the shadow of the earth touching the crystal edge of the satellite like a ring of smoke. The reflection flowed gloriously under the luminary in a spreading wake of greenish silver, whose hither extremity trembled to the vessel’s side. The convict ship, sleeping upon the dark and breathless surface of water, her white sails gently fanning at long intervals to a delicate motion of the hull; the dark figures of the convicts grouped in a mass on one side of the main-deck, their faces pale in the night-beam as they gazed at the moon; the crowd of seamen and women talking in subdued voices in the bows of the ship, where beyond them soared the jibs floating like gossamer in the moonlight; the dark ocean stretching, stirless and silent, into the north, star-studded, whilst southward it was lighted up by the distant, sunbright and violet flames of the electric clouds; the face of the patient, silver moon, with a shadow of the earth painted in a corner of her--this was a scene so rich in poetry, so vital, besides, with a strange, bitter human significance, that at any other time I would have abandoned my whole spirit to it and lost myself in contemplation. But I could think of nothing but my conversation with Tom, the change my quick ear had detected in his nature, his assurance to me that I did not know his heart--above all, his statement that before to-morrow night the ship would be in possession of the convicts. I believed him, but I could not realise his meaning. Yet I remember very well that conversation I had overheard between two sailors who talked of the convicts, knowing that Tom--I guessed they meant Tom--was the only navigator among the prisoners. I tried to settle my spirits, but my heart flung a fever into my blood and I longed to laugh out, to cry out, to run about. As the shadow deepened upon the moon, the crowd upon the forecastle fell silent. I looked over the side into the dark water and beheld a fish-shaped phantom of phosphorus sliding slowly along close under the surface; there was a little bubbling of fire about the centre of this strange shape where the fin of it projected. I knew what it was, yet glanced once or twice only without curiosity and went on thinking. Would they spare my cousin Will? Would they spare me? How could Tom be sure? The liberation of the convicts would be like the disgorging of hell. How could Tom foretell what would follow the demons’ seizure of the ship? But I cared not. Let Tom but gain his liberty and it mattered nothing to me what followed, though my own life should be forfeited. By the magic of sympathy the change that I had noticed in him was working in me. I felt as though a devil had entered into me, even as Tom had whispered that they had driven him to it: that injustice and labour and punishment, maddening to an innocent heart, had made a devil of him.