He had laid his hand on both hers as they clasped the child. Floyd-Rosney was still smiling and apparently gracious and good-humored, which might have seemed much, thus publicly withstood in this moment of excitement and stress. He was resolved that he would not lower his pride by an open and obvious struggle. He did not consider her pride. He forced her fingers apart, invisibly under the folds of the child’s cloak, by an old school-boy trick of suddenly striking the wrist a sharp blow. The muscles must needs relax in the pain, the hold give way, and, as the boy was about to slip from her clasp, his father called for the nurse, placed the child in the arms of the old servant and consigned them both to a stout roustabout who had them in the yawl in a trice. Without a word of apology, of justification, of soothing remonstrance, Floyd-Rosney turned away from his wife with brisk cheerfulness and once more addressed himself to the matter in hand. Paula felt that if this had been her husband of yesterday it would have broken her heart. But that identity was dead,--suddenly dead. Indeed, had he ever lived? She wondered that the revulsion of feeling did not overpower her. But she was consciously cool, composed, steady, without the quiver of a muscle. She made no excuses to herself in her introspection for her husband,--gave him no benefit of doubt,--urged no palliation of his brutality. Yet these were not far to seek. The hurricane had come at a crisis in his mental experience. He had been publicly held up to ridicule, even to reprehension, by his own subservient wife. He had been released from this pitiable attitude by some unimaginable impulse in the brother of the man whom she had jilted at the last moment, and thus confused, absorbed, scarcely himself at the instant of the stupendous crash, he had lost sight of the fact, if he had earlier noticed, that the child was not with her, and in the saloon,--his latest glimpse of the boy was in her arms. It was natural that he did not witness the rescue by Ducie, for he was planning an escape for them all, and, surely, it was her place to defer to his views, his seniority, his experience, and be guided by him rather than take the helm herself. Naught of this had weight with her. She only remembered the provocation that had elicited her fleer, his furious whisper of objection, his censorious interference, the humiliation so bitter that she could not lift her head while his rebukes hissed in her ears before them all. Then, in that terrible moment of calamity, he had not thought of her, of their son,--had not rushed to gather them in his arms, that they might, at least, die together. Doubtless, he would have said they could die together in due time,--it was not yet the moment for dying--and he was preparing to postpone that finality as far as might be.