CHAPTER XVII
The Masked Voice
THE leaden fog wrapped the world in an embrace as inexorable as the coils of some great, gray, slimy serpent. Through its sluggish folds the life-boat crept at snail's pace. In the bow, Rose rested in exhaustion, her eyes closed, her head pillowed on a life preserver, her sodden garments modelled closely to the slender body that ever and again was shaken by a long, shuddering respiration.
Seated on the nearest thwart, Alan watched over her with a grimly hopeless solicitude. Premonition of misfortune darkened his heart with an impenetrable shadow. In the stern, Tom Barcus presided morosely over the steering gear.
Thus for hours on end it had been with these three: ever the boat ploughed steadily onward. Destitute of compass and of all notion of the sun's bearings, Barcus steered mainly through force of habit—the salt-water man's instinctive feeling that no boat under way should ever in any conceivable circumstance lack a hand at the helm.
For some time subsequent to the collision fog-
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