He submitted to his oiling; then just as he was about to leave his cabin a remembrance came to him. He fumbled in his berth for the sovereign-case on his watch chain, opened it, slipped out a couple of gold pieces, took what looked like a wafer from beneath them, and put it into his mouth. The two men with him imagined the small gray disc to be some kind of sustaining lozenge. It was a tiny portrait of Laura Marton. As he went shivering on deck Caragh made a wry mouth as his teeth met on the picture, and he imagined the suggestions its discovery would have offered to the woman he was to wed. He had a hazy recollection afterwards of the close and eager crowd which surrounded him as he fitted the clammy belt of the lifeline about his body and climbed over the taffrail for a dive. It was a crowd warm with enthusiasm and admiration; with little to say, but with that in what it said which might have brought a blush to his whole body. But he heard nothing. Then as the vessel lurched to starboard he let his body fall forward and shot down into the sea. Before his head rose above the surface the cold water had changed his indifference to life into a disgust at his own temerity. The ship heeled over as if about to impale him with her yards. Then he was lifted on the roller, and saw the wreck before him, looking much further off than it had from the deck. He laid his course on a cliff to the south which the captain had given him to steer by, and turned over on his side. His left arm swung high and white out of the blue water, regular and unhurried as though he were bathing, and his head dipped under and was driven clear of the surface with every stroke. With his face thrown back he could see the dark skirting of spectators along the ship's side swinging into and out of the sky. They were admiring in speech and in silence his courage and cool indifference to the occasion, and the humour of their admiration moved him as he thought of it almost to a laugh. That he, with his despairs, his self-contempt, his growing disgust at his foolhardiness, should appear to them as a heroic figure appealed to his keen sense of parody. What pretty reading in unconscious irony would the obituary paragraphs of his valour make for the gods of fate. Yet valour of a sort he had, for it never once occurred to him to feign an inability to go further, though the line he carried was beginning to retard him at every stroke.