The people on the Australasian, for their part, knew better what had occurred.  There was bustle and confusion enough on deck and on the captain’s bridge, to be sure:  “Man overboard!”—­three sharp rings at the engine bell:—­“Stop her short!—­reverse engines!—­lower the gig!—­look sharp, there, all of you!” Passengers hurried up breathless at the first alarm to know what was the matter.  Sailors loosened and lowered the boat from the davits with extraordinary quickness.  Officers stood by, giving orders in monosyllables with practised calm.  All was hurry and turmoil, yet with a marvellous sense of order and prompt obedience as well.  But, at any rate, the people on deck hadn’t the swift swirl of the boisterous water, the hampering wet clothes, the pervading consciousness of personal danger, to make their brains reel, like Felix Thurstan’s.  They could ask one another with comparative composure what had happened on board; they could listen without terror to the story of the accident.

It was the thirteenth day out from Sydney, and the Australasian was rapidly nearing the equator.  Toward evening the wind had freshened, and the sea was running high against her weather side.  But it was a fine starlit night, though the moon had not yet risen; and as the brief tropical twilight faded away by quick degrees in the west, the fringe of cocoanut palms on the reef that bounded the little island of Boupari showed out for a minute or two in dark relief, some miles to leeward, against the pale pink horizon.  In spite of the heavy sea, many passengers lingered late on deck that night to see the last of that coral-girt shore, which was to be their final glimpse of land till they reached Honolulu, en route for San Francisco.

Bit by bit, however, the cocoanut palms, silhouetted with their graceful waving arms for a few brief minutes in black against the glowing background, merged slowly into the sky or sank below the horizon.  All grew dark.  One by one, as the trees disappeared, the passengers dropped off for whist in the saloon, or retired to the uneasy solitude of their own state-rooms.  At last only two or three men were left smoking and chatting near the top of the companion ladder; while at the stern of the ship Muriel Ellis looked over toward the retreating island, and talked with a certain timid maidenly frankness to Felix Thurstan.

There’s nowhere on earth for getting really to know people in a very short time like the deck of a great Atlantic or Pacific liner.  You’re thrown together so much, and all day long, that you see more of your fellow-passengers’ inner life and nature in a few brief weeks than you would ever be likely to see in a long twelvemonth of ordinary town or country acquaintanceship.  And Muriel Ellis had seen a great deal in those thirteen days of Felix Thurstan; enough to make sure in her own heart that she really liked him—­well—­so much that she looked up with a pretty blush of self-consciousness