Ducie’s brain seemed awhirl at the moment of the disaster. As he regained his mental poise he saw Mrs. Floyd-Rosney on her knees frantically struggling with the door of her stateroom, the lock evidently having somehow sprung in the contortions of the steamer under the blast. She looked up at him for an instant, but her tongue was obviously incapable of framing a word in the excitement of that tempestuous crisis. Ducie suddenly remembered, what everyone else but the mother had forgotten, that the little boy had scarcely five minutes earlier gone to the stateroom to be dealt with for the kissing microbes. Observing the inadequacy of her efforts Ducie rushed to her assistance and sought, by main strength, to force open the twisted and warped door. It was so difficult to effect an entrance that he began to doubt if this could be done without an axe, when he succeeded in splintering it a trifle where it had already showed signs of having sustained a fracture. Into the aperture thus made he thrust his foot and then wedged in his knee, finally shattering a panel from the frame, to the horror of the prisoners within, whose voices of terror found an echo in Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s anguished exclamations. Ducie triumphantly lifted out little Ned and then the old colored nurse was dragged through the aperture, scarcely sufficient for the transit. “There you are, good as new,” cried Ducie genially. Some of the doors of the staterooms had burst from their fastenings, and were sagging and swaying inward, offering pitfalls for the unwary, and, in that wild and excited group, Ducie alone bethought himself of precaution. “Look out for the boy, Mrs. Floyd-Rosney,--he may fall through one of those open doors into deep water or into the furnace,--I don’t know what is now beneath this part of the saloon,--the boat seems twisted and broken to pieces.” The suggestion of danger to the child was like a potent elixir to Paula. Her eyes, strained and set, recovered their normal look of perception, wild and haggard though they were. She caught the child in her arms and, although trembling and occasionally staggering under his weight, she would not relinquish him to Ducie as he desired, but carried him herself safely along the precarious way. Ducie aided her to clamber up the steep incline where the doors ceased and the wall was unbroken, there being here the barber-shop and the office, and the large space utilized as a smoking-room. Through the windows streamed a deluge of rain, and broken glass lay scattered all about.