“Put your face tight against my chest—­put your hands over your nose and mouth—­quick!”

She obeyed upon the word and a thrill, not of pain, shot to Dan’s brain.  He could feel her, soft and trembling, against him, and her warm hair brushed his cheek.  With an effort he choked back the flooding emotion.  Was it fair, was it right to her—­now?  But his arm unconsciously tightened about her.

The red glow shone through the girl’s closed eyelids—­a great heat scorched the back of her neck, and she felt a quiver in the body shielding her; but the grip of the arm remained.  There came a blast of God’s merciful salt cold air, and she opened her eyes.  He was looking down at her—­and he saw what he saw.  For they were two souls hanging together on the verge of eternity—­alone; two souls with death all about fusing them until they were as one.  She looked at him long.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.  The words sounded thick.

“No—­a little.  It got my neck and ears.  The ship was yawing, though, and that saved us.  It was like snapping your hand through a gas flame.”

“I’m afraid,” said the girl with a sob catching her voice.

“No—­don’t be afraid!  I’ll save you—­some way.”

She opened her eyes and looked in his face again.

“My nobleman! my—­”

“Don’t!” cried Dan, interrupting her.  “You don’t know what you are saying.  It’s so different now.”  He well knew that impulses which might move a woman in the arms of a man, no matter who, battling for her life, might be for the moment only and lead to nothing but regret and alarm afterwards.  How could it be otherwise with Virginia Howland?  The girl, as though she had not heard him, as though she had forgotten the emotions which had swayed her, closed her eyes wearily and turned her face away.

The ship was yawing again.  Tongues of flame reached hungrily for them, licking above Dan’s red-gold hair and his back, but never touching the girl.  Then the swing of the vessel and the wind again; then the fire and the torturing heat.  Once Dan saw his grandfather’s vessel burning as he had often pictured it in boyhood, and he trembled horribly for a second, but only for a second; then he became rigid and smiled at the apparition.  The girl had evidently fainted; she hung a dead weight upon his arm.  Again the wind drove the flames far out over the stern.

There came a time when the fight for life was waged mechanically, when all sense of thought vanished, and the carrying on of the struggle came down to mere animal instinct.  At such times a brave man need not be ashamed to die—­the time has long elapsed when cravens perish.  But the very brave, the physically as well as mentally brave, fight on to the end, instinctively.  And so Dan fought.  He knew that Virginia Howland hung on his arm—­but the fire had gone from his ken; he was fighting something, that was all he knew, or cared, since it was for her.