‘I saw you yesterday,’ said Mr Markham. (It had blown more than half a gale, and late in the afternoon three heavy seas had come aboard.  The third officer at this moment was employed with half a dozen seamen in repairing damages.) ’I was watching.  As I judged, it was the nicest miss you weren’t overboard.  Over and above employers’ liability you should insure.  The Hands Across Mutual Exchange—­ that’s your office.’

Mr Markham leaned back, and put a hand up to his inner breast-pocket—­it is uncertain whether for his cigar-case, or for some leaflet relating to the Hands Across.

‘Take care, sir!’ said the third officer sharply.  ‘That stanchion—­’

He called too late.  The hand as it touched the breast-pocket, shot up and clawed at the air.  With a voice that was less a cry than a startled grunt, Mr Markham pitched backwards off the fore-deck into the sea.

The third officer stared for just a fraction of a second; ran, seized a life-belt as the liner’s length went shooting past; and hurled it—­ with pretty good aim, too—­almost before a man of his working party had time to raise the cry of ‘Man overboard!’ Before the alarm reached the bridge, he had kicked off his shoes; and the last sound in his ears as he dived was the ping of the bell ringing down to the engine-room—­a thin note, infinitely distant, speaking out of an immense silence.

CHAPTER II.

It was a beautifully clean dive; but in the flurry of the plunge the third officer forgot for an instant the right upward slant of the palms, and went a great way deeper than he had intended.  By the time he rose to the surface the liner had slid by, and for a moment or two he saw nothing; for instinctively he came up facing aft, towards the spot where Mr Markham had fallen, and the long sea running after yesterday’s gale threw up a ridge that seemed to take minutes—­though in fact it took but a few seconds—­to sink and heave up the trough beyond.  By-and-by a life-belt swam up into sight; then another—­at least a dozen had been flung; and beyond these at length, on the climbing crest of the swell two hundred yards away, the head and shoulders of Mr Markham.  By great good luck the first life-belt had fallen within a few feet of him, and Mr Markham had somehow managed to get within reach and clutch it—­a highly creditable feat when it is considered that he was at best a poor swimmer, that the fall had knocked more than half the breath out of his body, that he had swallowed close on a pint of salt water, and that a heavy overcoat impeded his movements.  But after this fair first effort Mr Markham, as his clothes weighed him down, began—­as the phrase is—­to make very bad weather of it.  He made worse and worse weather of it as Dick Rendal covered the distance between them with a superlatively fine side-stroke, once or twice singing out to him to hold on, and keep a good heart.  Mr Markham, whether he heard or