Lanyard gave no sign, but his heart sank.  He had exhausted his last resource to gain time, he was now at his wits’ ends.  Only his star could save him now....

Monk turned the keys, but all at once forgot his purpose, and with hands stayed upon the lid of the box paused and cocked his ears attentively to rumours of excitement and confusion on the deck.  The instinct of the seafaring man uppermost, Monk stiffened, grew rigid from head to foot.

One heard hurried feet, outcries, a sudden jangle of the engine-room telegraph...

“Monsieur! monsieur!” Liane implored.  “Open that box!”

The words were on her lips when she was thrown off her feet by a frightful shock which stopped the Sybarite dead in full career, before the screw, reversed in obedience to the telegraph, could grip the water and lessen her momentum.  The woman cannoned against Monk, shouldering him bodily aside.  Instinctively snatching at the box, Monk succeeded only in dragging it to the edge of the desk before a second shock, accompanied by a grinding crash of steel and timbers, seemed to make the yacht leap like a live thing stricken mortally.  She heeled heavily to starboard, the despatch-box went to the floor with a thump lost in the greater din, Liane Delorme was propelled headlong into a corner, Monk thrown to his knees, Phinuit lifted out of his chair and flung sprawling into the arms of Lanyard, who, pinned down by the other’s weight in his own chair, felt this last slide backwards to starboard and bring up against a partition with a bang that drove the breath out of him in one enormous gust.

He retained, however, sufficient presence of mind neatly to disarm Phinuit before that one guessed what he was about.

After that second blow, the Sybarite remained at a standstill, but the continued beating of her engines caused her to quiver painfully from trucks to keelson, as if in agonies of death such as those which had marked the end of Popinot.  Of a sudden the engines ceased, and there was no more movement of any sort, only an appalling repose with silence more dreadful still.

Lanyard had no means to measure how long that dumb suspense lasted which was imposed by the stunned faculties of all on board.  It seemed interminable.  Eventually he saw Monk pick himself up and, making strange moaning noises, like a wounded animal, throw himself upon the door, jerk it open, and dash out.

As if he had only needed that vision of action to animate him, Lanyard threw Phinuit off, so that he staggered across the slanting floor toward the door.  When he brought himself up by catching hold of its frame, he was under the threat of his own pistol in Lanyard’s hands.  He lingered for a moment, showing Lanyard a distraught and vacant face, then apparently realising his danger faded away into the saloon.

With a roughness dictated by the desperate extremity, Lanyard strode over to Liane Delorme, where she still crouched in her corner, staring witlessly, caught her by one arm, fairly jerked her to her feet, and thrust her stumbling out into the saloon.  Closing the door behind her, he shot its bolts.