The day was perfect and the scene beautiful.  They had watched the sun come up over the trees at their back.  And it was as if they had seen a sunrise for the first time in their life.  To them, it was neither beautiful nor familiar; it was sinister and strange.  A chill, that was not of the dawn but of death itself, lay over everything.  The morning wind was the breath of the tomb, the smells that came to them from the island bore the taint of mortality, the very sunshine seemed icy.  They suffered — the five survivors of the night’s tragedy — with a scarifying sense of disillusion with Nature.  It was as though a beautiful, tender, and fondly loved mother had turned murderously on her children, had wounded them nearly to death, had then tried to woo them to her breast again.  The loveliness of her, the mindless, heartless, soulless loveliness, as of a maniac tamed, mocked at their agonies, mocked with her gentle indifference, mocked with her self-satisfied placidity, mocked with her serenity and her peace.  For them she was dead — dead like those whom we no longer trust.

The sun was racing up a sky smooth and clear as gray glass.  It dropped on the torn green sea a shimmer that was almost dazzling; but ere was something incongruous about that — as though Nature had covered her victim with a spangled scarf.  It brought out millions of sparkles in the white sand; and there seemed something calculating about that — as though she were bribing them with jewels to forget.

“Say, let’s cut out this business of going, over and over it,” said Ralph Addington with a sudden burst of irritability.  “I guess I could give up the ship’s cat in exchange for a girl or two.”  Addington’s face was livid; a muscular contraction kept pulling his lips away from his white teeth; he had the look of a man who grins satanically at regular intervals.

By a titanic mental effort, the others connected this explosion with Billy Fairfax’s last remark.  It was the first expression of an emotion so small as ill-humor.  It was, moreover, the first excursion out of the beaten path of their egotisms.  It cleared the atmosphere a little of that murky cloud of horror which blurred the sunlight.  Three of the other four men — Honey Smith, Frank Merrill, Pete Murphy — actually turned and looked at Ralph Addington.  Perhaps that movement served to break the hideous, hypnotic spell of the sea.

“Right-o!” Honey Smith agreed weakly.  It was audible in his voice, the effort to talk sanely of sane things, and in the slang of every day.  “Addington’s on.  Let’s can it!  Here we are and here we’re likely to stay for a few days.  In the meantime we’ve got to live.  How are we going to pull it off?”

Everybody considered his brief harangue; for an instant, it looked as though this consideration was taking them all back into aimless meditation.  Then, “That’s right,” Billy Fairfax took it up heroically.  “Say, Merrill,” he added in almost a conversational tone, “what are our chances?  I mean how soon do we get off?”