“Poor Jackson!” he murmured.  “One of my best men.  I remember seeing his wife, a pretty little woman, and two children coming to meet him last homeward trip.  They will be there again.  Good God!  That Lascar who was saved has some one to await him in a Bombay village, I suppose.”

The gale sang a mad requiem to its victims.  The very surface was torn from the sea.  The ship drove relentlessly through sheets of spray that caused the officers high up on the bridge to gasp for breath.  They held on by main force, though protected by strong canvas sheets bound to the rails.  The main deck was quite impassable.  The promenade deck, even the lofty spar deck, was scourged with the broken crests of waves that tried with demoniac energy to smash in the starboard bow, for the Sirdar was cutting into the heart of the cyclone.

The captain fought his way to the charthouse.  He wiped the salt water from his eyes and looked anxiously at the barometer.

“Still falling!” he muttered.  “I will keep on until seven o’clock and then bear three points to the southward.  By midnight we should be behind it.”

He struggled back into the outside fury.  By comparison the sturdy citadel he quitted was Paradise on the edge of an inferno.

Down in the saloon the hardier passengers were striving to subdue the ennui of an interval before they sought their cabins.  Some talked.  One hardened reprobate strummed the piano.  Others played cards, chess, draughts, anything that would distract attention.

The stately apartment offered strange contrast to the warring elements without.  Bright lights, costly upholstery, soft carpets, carved panels and gilded cornices, with uniformed attendants passing to and fro carrying coffee and glasses—­these surroundings suggested a floating palace in which the raging seas were defied.  Yet forty miles away, somewhere in the furious depths, four corpses swirled about with horrible uncertainty, lurching through battling currents, and perchance convoyed by fighting sharks.

The surgeon had been called away.  Iris was the only lady left in the saloon.  She watched a set of whist players for a time and then essayed the perilous passage to her stateroom.  She found her maid and a stewardess there.  Both women were weeping.

“What is the matter?” she inquired.

The stewardess tried to speak.  She choked with grief and hastily went out.  The maid blubbered an explanation.

“A friend of hers was married, miss, to the man who is drowned.”

“Drowned!  What man?”

“Haven’t you heard, miss?  I suppose they are keeping it quiet.  An English sailor and some natives were swept off the ship by a sea.  One native was saved, but he is all smashed up.  The others were never seen again.”

Iris by degrees learnt the sad chronicles of the Jackson family.  She was moved to tears.  She remembered the doctor’s hesitancy, and her own idle phrase—­“a huge coffin.”