The strange exigencies of their lives during the past two days had ordained that this should be Philip's first avowal of his feelings. Under the stress of overpowering impulse he had clasped Iris to his heart when they were parting on the island. In obedience to a stronger law than any hitherto revealed to her innocent consciousness the girl had flown to his arms when he came to the hut. And that was all their love-making, two blissful moments of delirium wrenched from a time of a gaunt tragedy, and followed by a few hours of self-negation. Yet they sufficed--to the man--and the woman is never too ready to count the cost when her heart declares its passion. But the morrow was not to be denied. Its bitter awakening had come. In the very agony of a sublime withdrawal Iris realized what manner of man this was whom she had determined to thrust aside so that she might keep her troth. She dared not look at him. She could not compel her quivering lips to frame a word of excuse or reiterated resolve. With a heart-breaking cry of sheer anguish she fled from him, running away along the deck with the uncertain steps of some sorely stricken creature of the wild. He did not try to restrain her. Heedless of the perplexed scowl with which Coke was watching him from the bridge, he looked after her until she vanished in the cabin which had been vacated for her use by the chief engineer of the vessel. Even her manifest distress gave him a sense of riotous joy that was hardly distinguishable from the keenest spiritual suffering. "Give you up!" he muttered again. "No, Iris, not if Satan brought every dead Verity to aid the living one in his demand."