At the dead man's side knelt upon the deck a small, spare figure clad in black and wearing his left arm in a sling. With his right hand he held a crucifix to the blue lips that would never breathe a prayer to the Virgin again. The small mouth and refined features of the praying man were strangely out of keeping with his tempestuous surroundings. Unmindful, however, of wind and waves alike, he knelt and prayed audibly. Each lurch of the vessel threw him forward, so that, in order to save himself from falling, he was obliged to press heavily upon the dead man's throat and breast; but this he heeded not. His girlish blue eyes were half closed in an ecstasy of religious fervour, and the pale, narrow face wore a light that was not reflected from sea or sky. This was the man who had unhesitatingly attacked Vellacott, had dared to pit his small strength, more of nerve than of muscle, against the young Englishman's hardened sinews. Violence in itself was most abhorrent to him; it had no part in his nature; and consequently, by the strange tenets of Ignatius Loyola's disciples, he was condemned to a course of it. Any objectionable duty, such as this removal of Vellacott, was immediately assigned to him in the futile endeavour of subjecting the soul to the brain. A true Jesuit must have no nature of his own and no individuality. He is simply a machine, with likes and dislikes, conscience and soul subject to the will of his superior, whose mind is also under the same arbitrary control; and so on to the top. If at the head there were God, it would be well; but man is there, and consequently the whole society is a gigantic mistake. To be a sincere member of it, a man must be a half-witted fool, a religious fanatic, or a rogue for whom no duplicity is too scurrilous, even though it amount to blasphemy. René Drucquer, the man kneeling on the slimy deck, was as nearly a religious fanatic as his soft, sweet nature would allow. With greater bodily strength and attendant greater passions, he would have been a simple monomaniac. In him the passion for self-devotion was singularly strong, and contact with men had cooled it down into an unusually deep sense of duty. Personally courageous, his bravery was of a high order, if the spirit of self-devotion called it into existence. In this his courage was more akin to that of women than of men. If duty drove him he would go where the devil drags most people, and René Drucquer was not by any means the first man or woman whose life has been wrecked, wasted, and utterly misled by a blind devotion to duty.