At dinner that last night, the place of the wireless youth was vacant. So was the place of the Dutch official next Lady Neave, whom they called Lady Gieve, because during the first days she had worn her jacket of that name, deflated, but evident, all day and, according to report, all night. Half-way across the Atlantic she had been smiled out of her fears to the extent of carrying the life-preserver over her arm.

Miss Ellis was the only person who took no part in discussing the rumor which ran about the ship of a wireless message said to have been received by the Dutch official. His bedroom steward, also Dutch, had seen the message—"A great battle and a German defeat."

The news accounted beyond doubt for the increased noisiness in the dining saloon. From the table behind Newcomb rose excited accents, "Es ist unglaÜblich!"

Newcomb turned, and caught Miss Ellis's eye. He had changed his place to the empty one beside her after hearing that Mr. Grant wasn't coming down—"a headache."

"The wireleless leakage seems to have let loose a fair amount of furor Teutonicus," he said.

She nodded; plainly she had heard the news. But she didn't want to discuss it at a board where old Professor Mohrenheim and his gentle, kindly wife occupied their places, as polite as ever, but restrained and preoccupied to-night. Voices from the all-German table rose louder.

It was known that on the last voyage excitement over some war news, published in the customary small weekly, had led to a riot. Certain offended patriots, among both Germans and their opponents, had been brought to port in irons. This was the first crossing during which no newspaper had been issued, and no wireless telegrams had appeared on the notice-board. The wisdom of these measures was abundantly proved. The mere breath of rumor had transformed the ship's company. Allies put their heads together and exulted. Neutrals argued more or less openly, betraying in every word the impossibility of neutrality. The old German couple at the end of Nan's table sat marooned. They glanced now and then, wistfully, at the all-German table next them. The sound of their tongue rumbled and clashed above the jar of crockery and service metal.

"Isn't it strange,"—Nan leaned to Newcomb as she lowered her voice,—"when I used to hear German, I'd think about music and poetry and beautiful words like Waldesduft—"

"And what do you think about now—words like Belgium?"

"That isn't fair," she said quietly. "All war is awful."

"But I'd like to know what you do think about, then, instead of music and Waldesduft."

"No."

He urged her. "Please!"

"I couldn't, not at the same table where that dear old couple sit," she said quickly and glanced down the long table at the Mohrenheims.

"Tell me upstairs?"

She shook her head.

"I don't think I shall even upstairs. If, as I believe, the worst stories aren't true, it's wrong to repeat them."

"Why is it wrong to tell me and let me judge if I am to believe?"

But she wouldn't. "To repeat them gives them a false trueness," she said in that careful undertone. "Oh, I can't explain; but just to put them into words seems to spread a poison."

"You can't trust me to distinguish, to help you to distinguish?"

Again she shook her head. "What I have to think is, if some people, mistaken people, believed such things about us Americans, what would I say if I were asked whether I thought it a good thing that the false stories against us should be repeated? To make horrible pictures in people's brains; and, if the brains are weak, to turn them."

"I am sorry my brains inspire you with such distrust."

"Perhaps it's my own I'm shaky about. But I don't believe any brain can keep steady under some stories. No; mustn't think about them."

"She gets that from Grant," Newcomb decided. He looked across the table. Next the captain's empty place, sat the only person in the saloon unmoved, you would say, by the news—a British naval officer, grave, monosyllabic, and showing just that same face throughout the voyage. Not so much as a hint about his errand to the States and little enough about anything else. Until the fourth night out he had slept or dozed over a book. The only five minutes during which he had appeared really awake had been when some one in the smoking-room repeated Julian Grant's asseveration that the German atrocity stories were "faked." "Every nation tells of its enemy. Only the ignorant and unthinking are taken in."

It was then that the officer dozing in the corner lifted that face of his, with its hard, fine outline like a profile on an old coin, and came to life. The indifference cleared out of his eyes as low-hung, slumbering smoke will clear before the blast.

"If to be taken in by 'faked' stories was all that the innocent had to fear!" In cold accents he told about a Belgian girl. Daughter of an officer in the Belgian Army, a man he knew. When the Germans took Antwerp she was carried off. Fell into the hands of a U-boat captain. When he'd done with her, handed her over to his crew. She didn't die quickly enough. They threw her overboard. "An officer's daughter!" he repeated, as though that were the culminating point of the horror.

Some one repeated the story to Julian. His anger was a thing no one would forget. Believe it? Such stories were told for a purpose. It was "the kind of poison that infects people's wits and loses them their souls. Makes brute beasts out of humans. There are minds that batten on such lies. They get decent people to listen in the fevered, abnormal state all nerves are in nowadays. Foulness that would be choked back down their obscene throats at other times, it's listened to like some message out of Sinai or Olympus. I tell you the German U-boat captains are as good men as ever the hag War breeds. They must be men of character. You daren't give a job like that to a drunken, rotten rouÉ."

Here was Miss Greta at last, never so late before and never so resplendent. Silver sequins and black lace for that last night.

"I'm glad"—she spoke to a lady across the table—"glad to see you've emancipated yourself."

"Emancipated—how?" Lady Neave asked.

"You've broken the tyranny of the Gieve jacket."

"Don't tell me I've—" Lady Neave turned to look at the back of her chair—"yes, gone and forgotten it!" She moved outward on her swiveled seat.

"No! no!" The congressman from Vermont protested there was no need to prepare for anything so grotesque, so melodramatic, as a cold-blooded attempt to sink this poor old tub.

Miss Greta held high her braid-crowned head. "This innocent old tub," she said, "has carried thousands of tons of ammunition; but," she added relentingly, "I don't think Lady Gieve—oh, forgive me! I mean Lady Neave," she bent gracious brows upon her opposite neighbor,—"I quite agree you won't need your packet on this voyage."

No one answered. In the midst of a general animation, the silence that reigned again around Greta spoke loud. She stared about her.

"What has become of the hors d'oeuvres?" she demanded. The Dutch steward could not have helped hearing. He went on serving the others. Again she spoke to him, more sharply still.

"Alvays it ees somet'ing! From de fir-rst you come on board," he muttered incoherently.

She turned round in her seat.

"What? What do you say?"

"Vhat I say? You need not be down on me because Zhermany is beat."

Miss Greta stared.

"Germany beaten! You must be mad."

The steward's face had grown red; his anger was mounting still.

"I get it straight," he said. "Dere vas a great battle. De English and French have beat de Zhermans."

"It is a lie!"

"How do you know that?" asked the calm voice of Newcomb at Greta's side.

"How does one know anything? You wouldn't expect me to consider the possibility of such a thing just because"—her contempt followed the steward for those first yards of his progress toward the side table—"because that sort of creature says so?" She looked round for understanding. Something in the averted eyes of the company nettled her. "He says it, armer Wurm," she went on with her head high, "from the same motives that make others long to believe it. Jealousy."

"Do we understand you to say," Newcomb asked, "that you wouldn't believe news, however authentic, of a German defeat?"

"There couldn't be authentic news of a German defeat. If it came from some one I knew and trusted, if all the people I know and trust combined to say there had been a German defeat, I should know they were wrong."

While she waited for the hors d'oeuvres, her handsome shoulders thrown back, her chin high, she pronounced a pÆan to Kultur cum militarism. Newcomb construed it as a letting off pent-up steam, a vent for anger against Miss Ellis and against the gathering cloud of enemies. But it was also something more. It had in it an element of fanaticism, mixed with balked passion for force. A reckless joy in the doctrine of stick-at-nothing to serve the end. With such an accent we have heard some one very old, or very young and weak saying, "We bombed them out of the wood," or, "We took Hill 60." It is a singular thing in psychology and yet to be explored, this passion on the part of the physically weaker for those very brute forces in the universe which, but for their opposites, would be the sure undoing of all but the physically strongest, and, in the end, of them as well.

In the midst of her hymn to pro-Teutonism, Ashmole came in, looking more idiotic than usual, staring about out of his big glasses as though he couldn't recognize the table.

"Here we are," Miss Greta hailed him.

The youth paused by her chair an instant and mumbled something unintelligible, his eyes goggling as they swept the saloon.

"They told me the captain was down here."

Greta took hold of Ashmole's arm and tried in vain to pull him into the vacant place. He stood there lost while she whispered. Suddenly he bent and whispered back. They had done too much whispering in these last days for that to strike any one as specially strange. What struck Newcomb was the effect on Miss Greta of whatever it was Ashmole had said.

On the face that had met with brazen defiance the news of a German defeat, was stamped something more than consternation. Ashmole's own nerves were not so shaken, but he saw that.

"It's all right," he said in the act of turning from her; "they won't get us. The lights are all out."

"Lights out, you say!" Greta had risen.

"Every port covered," Ashmole muttered over his shoulder.

"Fools! They must put the lights on. Do you hear? Instantly!" She clutched her chair back. "This isn't the boat they want—"

Nan had risen, too. But that was because she saw Julian at the door of the saloon. Without a word he held up his hand. Equally without sound, she slipped away from the table and went toward the waiting figure. As she reached the door, a dull sound came, with a long shuddering. It passed through the ship from end to end. Instead of the echo of that detonation setting the whole place instantly in motion, it had the effect of stilling for those first seconds such motion as had been. Several hundred tongues ceased wagging. Forks and spoons remained, arrested, half-way to people's mouths. The waiters stood, dish-covers in their hands, or bottles lifted to fill glass. The very engines slowed to listen.

Even after the general movement began in the saloon, it was quiet movement and curiously undramatic; no crying out, no mad rush for the deck.

Some people looked about as if for information. Others tried to smile.

"It's come," said the congressman.

"What—what has come?" demanded Lady Neave through the rising hum.

Out of all the growing murmur and movement Newcomb heard Greta's tense whisper: "That—a torpedo?"

The captain's order traveled with a superhuman quickness:

"Life-belts first! Women and children to the boats!"

"Plenty of time for everybody to get a life-belt," was another form that ran from mouth to mouth. Whether that insistence calmed the people, certainly it was a strangely well-behaved company that made its way, in spite of the ship's increasing list to starboard, along corridors and up companionways. Scarcely a breach in the general self-control till, on the lifeboat-deck, parties were broken up, and all men told to stand back. Though the great majority accepted the order in silence, it broke the courage of some among the women. Certain men tried persuasion. There were dumb partings; there was agonized resistance. Two or three evidently meant to stand out to the bitter end against being saved, or lost, apart from their men-folk. For a minute the morale of the crowd was in grave danger. A young wife's recurrent sob: "I can't! I can't!" rose to wildness with, "They'll have to kill me first!"

Newcomb, looking vainly about for Nan Ellis, saw a different face. Oh, yes, it belonged to that voice he had been hearing under all the rest, patient, gentle, tireless—the voice saying now in its foreign-sounding English "It is for your husband's safety that you go first." More than the words, the motherly kindness on the blunt-featured face of the old German lady, prevailed upon the distracted girl. She let go her husband's arm and clung to Mrs. Mohrenheim.

Newcomb saw now that it was Mrs. Mohrenheim who was helping the ship's officers to marshal and send forward the women and children to those who had charge of the boats. It looked as if the task would have been too much for the officers but for Mrs. Mohrenheim. An extraordinary vigor, an exalted persuasiveness, had transformed the heavy figure and the homely face. Something she had given no hint of during the voyage came out of hiding and "took charge."

In spite of the increased listing of the ship, through all his own excitement and personal fear, which Newcomb afterwards confessed, his habit of mechanical mental registry kept him vividly aware of what went on within his range.

Already, while Mrs. Mohrenheim was still dealing with that first and most unwilling of the young wives, Newcomb had seen Miss Greta pass. It hadn't taken her long to fling on a serge skirt and her fur-lined ulster. Above the life-belt fastened round her bulky figure was a brown canvas ruck-sack hoisted high against her shoulder-blades. She was fastening the buckles as she hastened toward her appointed boat, put a little out of her stride by the ever-stronger list to starboard. All the same, Miss Greta, beyond a doubt, would be among the first, Newcomb told himself, to take her appointed place, and hers would be the first boat launched.

"You will carry the child for this lady?"

Mrs. Mohrenheim had thrust a baby into Newcomb's arms.

"They say it's this way—this way!" The baby's mother, holding a little boy by the hand, hurried the child and Newcomb up the deck. The barrier of officers, stewards, and crew opened to let them through.

Yes, Miss Greta was already in the boat. The woman with the little boy was helped in, and Newcomb handed over the baby. The men at the pulleys began to lower the boat. Miss Greta was calmly tying a motor-veil round her cap.

Up on the bridge the captain, against a star-strewn sky, calling down orders, gave an impression of such tragic and awful loneliness that Newcomb was aware of a relief at seeing him joined by another figure. The two stood speaking while you might count seven or eight; then the captain pulled off his coat and exchanged with the captain of the watch. The captain of the watch came running down, putting on his chief's coat. He took charge of the next boat that was being lowered. That was the boat that tilted and hung for some seconds over the water at an angle of forty-five degrees. The angle increased to the perpendicular, and the boat whirled round, dropping the people into the oily water. The calm night air struck icily on Newcomb's sweat-beaded forehead. A horror of violent death had pierced the numbness that followed on his first panic. On the way back to the diminishing crowd of women he peered into men's faces.

"Do they realize?" he kept repeating to himself.

"Where were you when it struck us?" he heard some one ask an officer.

"Chart-room," was the curt reply.

Another voice as Newcomb passed said: "Not the periscope; but I saw the shark-fin wake of the torpedo."

Newcomb walked with difficulty, like a drunken man; it was this damned list. The most violent tossing in a hurricane was preferable. You'd have the plunging dive and recovery, which had something gallant in it, almost playful, like a giant gamboling. But this persistent violation of equilibrium got on a man's nerve.

"The lights have gone out on the starboard side," some one said.

Newcomb pulled out his watch. Stopped! He held it to his ear. No, it was going. And all this had happened in those few beggarly moments!

"What's that yelling about?" he asked irritably of a couple of men who, half-doubled, came up the slant by the wireless-room passage.

"Boat on the other side—smashed like an egg-shell against the hull."

People were drowning on both sides of the sinking ship.

"It's often safest on board," someone said.

"Yes; you stick to the ship."

There was now a dense crowd of men round the companionway. All but a handful of women had been distributed to the boats, but the handful kept on being renewed. Newcomb saw why. Grant and Miss Ellis, among others, were bringing up the people who remained over, in the second and third class. And among these huddled groups still the squat figure and the beautiful-ugly face of old Mrs. Mohrenheim moved, consoling, heartening.

"Yes, he will come after," she said. "Surely you will think about your children." More than once she had taken her text from a bystander's face. "Look at him, poor man! He can save himself if he has not you to think about. You would not risk his life? No, no. Komm, then, komm." The woman was passed along.

The mere getting to the boats was a trial of courage. Newcomb himself had no love of the horrible chute that now pitched sharply down to that dark, oily glitter that was the sea, but he offered to convoy the late-comers wherever a boat might be.

"No, you two." Mrs. Mohrenheim summoned Grant and Nan Ellis. Slowly they made their way forward with the little group of clinging children and bewildered women. Some crawled on hands and knees up the steep acclivity to where a boat swung from the davits. An officer passed the groups without stopping. He came hurrying, sliding, half squatting, with one leg stretched slanting down, the other crooked up, with the knee turned sharply out.

"You, now," he said to Mrs. Mohrenheim as he rose to his full height beside her.

"There are two ladies more." She pushed them forward.

The officer steadied them as they passed, and turned again to Mrs. Mohrenheim.

"You."

"There are those by the door; one is young." She turned unsteadily.

The officer clutched her. "I tell you,"—Newcomb barely caught the words—"it's now or never. There aren't boats enough!"

"I know," said Mrs. Mohrenheim.

She drew back and stretched out a hand to a muffled figure holding to a stanchion above where she stood. It was Professor Mohrenheim. Newcomb realized now that the figure had been there from the first.

"We have been together for forty years," the old woman said. "Too long to be parted now." Her husband bent down and took her hand. Now he had drawn her up beside him.

A man with bare feet and a blanket round him rushed on deck as word came, blown along from group to group, "The captain says every one for'ard, and each for himself."

Down by the bridge they were launching a collapsible raft.

The last Newcomb, or any one, saw of the Mohrenheims, they were standing together. They held to each other and to the stanchion.

Grant followed the girl down the swinging ladder to the raft.

Some one was crying:

"Get away! Pull out! For God's sake, get away!" Another, equally unrecognizable in the dimness, called out:

"She's going down! We'll be drawn in!"

As they pushed off, they saw the electric lights on the Leyden go out one by one.

Of the people on the raft more than one watched the death-throes of the ship with wet eyes, as though she were something sentient, human. Her angle of subsidence had changed sharply. The bow sank, leaving the stern nearly upright. Her mast was gone. For an instant her funnel lay along the water, and then with a dull roar as of the engines breaking loose and crashing down to the bottom, the rest of the Leyden sank out of sight.

The end of the great ship had come with a horrible quietness, in contrast to the cries of men struggling for their lives in the wash among the wreckage.

The captain had gone down with the ship. When those in charge of the raft heard that some one had seen him jump clear, they sent up a rocket. By that addition to the starlight, for a few instants a single, half-empty lifeboat could be seen rocking violently on the swell. Several men were clinging to the gunwale. As raft and boat were swept nearer, the officer in charge of the raft raised a shout. He had recognized the captain climbing into the boat, and hauling up after him the limp body of one of his companions.

The captain's first care, when he came alongside, was to relieve the congestion on the raft. He ordered the chief engineer to transfer eight or ten. The chief engineer remembered his helpers. Grant and Newcomb were told off. Yes, the captain said, they must bring the only woman into the lifeboat.

When the transference had been effected, another rocket was sent up in order that the surviving boats might come together.

"Look!" The girl grasped Grant's arm.

The captain, too, turned his head.

"By God!" he said.