Reyburn saw it, and even in that supreme moment, when life and death swung in the balance, an awful revulsion seized him.  He beheld now with a sickening shudder the woman cowering at his feet whose beauty an hour ago had melted his soul:  she was flesh to him only—­her beauty was of the earth, and flesh and the earth were passing, and it was other things on which such moments as these were opening—­things such as shone in the transfigured face of Lilian—­of Lilian whom, if this marsh-light had not dazzled him from his way, he might now be holding to his heart triumphant; for here disguises would have fallen and he could have claimed his own.  For, whether it were the terror of the time, or the trancelike and spiritual look of Lilian, or whether it were the jealous pang of seeing her in another’s arms, the love on which he had been waiting for two years and more, to which he had sacrificed time and endeavor, which had brought him here to this danger and this death, returned now and overwhelmed him, and the passion of a day and night fell apart and left him in its ruins.  This woman at his feet filled him with a strange disgust:  that other woman—­If this were the last hour of time, he would have risked his chances in eternity to have held her as John did.  He threw himself, face down, on the divan, and he cursed God and called upon the drowning wave to come.

The captain leaped down the companion-way, and caught his pistols from a drawer.  “Mr. Reyburn, we need you and the other gentlemen,” he cried.  “We are throwing out our ballast.  All hands must take spells at the pumps, for the leak gains, and I shall have all I can do to keep the men at work and the yacht afloat.”

“Let her sink!” yelled Reyburn into the cushions where he lay.  “Damn her! let her sink!” And he did not stir.  But John had gently released Lilian and placed her in a chair near the sofa where her mother lay gasping, and had sprung on deck with his father and the captain.

A horrid hour crept by—­a bitter blank below, hard and fierce work above—­and then the pumps were choked.  Lilian and her mother had crept on deck, holding by whatever they could find, and surveying the amazing scene around them.  For the great black storm-cloud was flying up and away, flying into the north-east, and through the torn vapors that followed in its rack a waning moon arose.  A tremendous sea was running, monstrous wave breaking on monstrous wave in a mad white frolic far as the eye could see; as one billow bounded along, curling and feathering and swelling on its path, a score leaped round it to powder themselves in a common cloud of spray; and every cloud of spray as it shot upward caught the long ray of the half-risen moon, that but darkly lighted and revealed an immensity of heaven, till all the weltering tumult of gloom and foam was sown with a myriad lunar rainbows.

The beauty of it almost overcame the terror with Lilian as she grasped her mother’s hand.