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Then the thought of Jeanne stabbed him full-awake. A great clarity of mind returned to him, with renewed vigor of body. He detached the now useless gyroscope from the belt, and let it drift away, in company with the welter of deck-chairs and wreckage that littered the sea. After this, he turned the knob of his signal-lamp, which flashed away bravely over the dark and gleaming swells.

“Romney! … Ohe-e-e-e-e! … Romney!” He shouted through cupped hands, as he flung aloft on marching crests of brine.

No answer. A few faint cries, but none from her.

All at once he noted a greenish flare in the heavens, almost directly overhead. Now he could distinguish a vibrant roar, louder than the swishing hiss of the combers. Spiraling downward, the Imperatrice had just sunk through the clouds, which were illumined for a long distance by its streaming banners of incandescence.

A moment he closed his eyes. The flaming aero-liner, now less than a mile aloft, threatened to precipitate its blazing, glowing wreck upon him. The anguish of death wrought strong in Hale; but through it all he felt a kind of wild, barbaric exultation.

“This, this,” he thought subconsciously, “is an end such as in these days any man might envy!” His only regret was that he might not live to write a stirring tale of the adventure; his only sorrow crystallized about the death of Jeanne, for even though the girl was living still, death was inevitable unless quick rescue could be made.

He shouted again and again, vainly. Then he fell a-wondering where she might be; how many from the ship might still survive; how death might come to him; what the sensation of dying really might be like.

The brightening glare of the liner once more drew his gaze. Down, ever downward, staggered the flaming craft, on which not a single being now remained alive. Slowly she wheeled about and about. Dark objects and a rain of dripping fire fell from her constantly. Out of her uprearing bow, flames were streaming full-volumed toward the zenith — a splendid, horrifying spectacle, affronting the calm moon.

Once more the man hailed:

“Romney! Romney!”

A gust of incandescent gases puffed from the liners bow. The gigantic craft seemed to empty herself in a second. She staggered, rolled slowly over, and gathered momentum downward. In a vast and rushing spiral she plunged; roaring into white heat; shot swiftly off to the left, and — violently exploding — leaped into twisted wreckage.

A stupendous concussion rolled its echoes over the sea as the shattered, glowing skeleton of metal surged into the waves.

Up leaped a Vesuvius of steam, writhing in snowy belchings under the moonlight. Hissings of tortured waters drowned the seethes of the waves and the death-cries of the struggling wretches annihilated by the hulk.

Then, for a moment, silence, while Norford — cradled upward on the breasts of the sea — dimly perceived a boiling, spuming writhe of brine that marked the liner’s grave.

A column of gaseous blue flame belched from the waves, writhed aloft and vanished.

Impassive, the sea covered all. The Imperatrice was dead.

VI

Overborne with horror, Norford Hale lapsed from knowledge of all things. Then — after how long a time he knew not — he once more found his senses.

“Where is Romney?”

The thought stabbed him. He rallied his forces, shouting to the vacancy of night and moonlight-sparkling sea.

A voice answered him, on the third call-her voice, off somewhere to windward.

“Romney! Oh, Romney! Where are you!”

Lifted on a crest, he peered across the moving plain of waters vast and slow. Now the tiny dots of signal-lights had grown fewer, scattered wide and vanishing upon the bosom of the primal mystery of old ocean. Not all man’s towering achievement, not all his sublime skill and science, had yet dethroned the sea from its supremacy. Terribly unconquered, it still rolled indomitable as when first the naked savage faced it, awed and wondering.

Again and again Hale shouted, till his throat went raw.

A signal-light rose as though answering, two or