bare-headed and clad only in khaki trousers and a short-sleeved shirt with no insignia of any kind, he wore authority as casually as he did the bedroom slippers and the untamed shock of blond hair. ‘Mate?’ Goddard asked.

The other nodded. ‘Lind.’ They shook hands, and he asked, ‘Yacht, I suppose, with that Mickey Mouse life raft?’

‘Yeah,’ Goddard replied. ‘I was single-handing—’ He stopped, overcome with another attack of weakness and shaking, and began to sway. Lind and another man caught him before he could fall. They led him toward the ladder to the deck above.

Karen Brooke had been watching from the corner of the promenade deck as Goddard made his way up the pilot ladder, marveling that a castaway would have the strength to do it. Apparently he hadn’t been aboard the raft very long. Just as they helped him over the bulwark, Mrs. Lennox came out of the passageway on the starboard side and joined her at the rail.

‘Isn’t it exciting?’ Mrs. Lennox asked. ‘A real rescue at sea. Who do you suppose he is?’

‘He must be off a small boat of some kind,’ Karen replied. ‘It was a tiny raft, one of the inflated kind, and I don’t think ships have them.’

‘A yachtsman! And look how tall he is.’ The older woman’s interest quickened. ‘Almost as big as Mr. Lind.’

Karen was amused, now that it appeared the man was neither ill nor dying of thirst and no longer an object of concern. He had cheated one species of man-eater, and now was being marked down by another. Mrs. Lennox had all the healthy interest in men of any normal, red-blooded, fifty-year-old widow, and she went to no great lengths to conceal it. She was still quite attractive, with a trim and sexy figure, smoky gray eyes, and a cascade of ash-blonde hair. She was wearing pajamas, slippers, and a nylon robe, but the hair was neatly combed and she had put on makeup.

Karen gazed musingly down into the well-deck where the man, surrounded by curious crew members, shook hands with the captain and then with Mr. Lind, and wondered if, in accordance with the old Chinese belief, she should try to summon up some feeling of responsibility for him. He really didn’t appear to need it. Even exhausted, barefoot, naked from the waist up, with water draining off him and his face covered with a week’s stubble of beard, he was an imposing figure and stamped with the competent look of a man who could take care of himself.

‘Good show, Mrs. Brooke.’ The two women turned. It was Mr. Egerton, coming down the ladder from the deck above to join them.

He was the passenger in Cabin G, a lean, erect man in his sixties with a gray moustache and gray hair, against which the black eye patch was undoubtedly dramatic but, to Karen, somehow vaguely theatrical, as though he had set out to contrive the effect. This was unfair, of course, and she realized that part of it was the clipped British accent, the occasional use of military terms, and expressions like that same ‘good show’. If you were a retired English army officer who had lost an eye somewhere, you could hardly be blamed if this were exactly the way a not very imaginative actor would play the part. He kept to his cabin a good deal of the time and seldom came to breakfast or lunch, so she didn’t know him very well, but he had beautiful manners and was an urbane and interesting dinner companion.

‘The second officer informs me you were the heroine of the affair,’ he went on. ‘Bit of good fortune for the chap that you were up and about, what?’

Karen caught the swift glance from Madeleine Lennox. The older woman recovered instantly, however, and exclaimed, ‘Darling, you mean you were the one who saw him? And you didn’t tell me?’

‘It was just an accident,’ Karen replied. ‘I woke up when the engine stopped and went up on the boat deck to look at the stars.’ Does that do it, dear? She went on to tell how she sighted the raft at the moment it was in the path of moonlight. Down in the well-deck, Mr. Lind and a seaman were helping the man toward the ladder. ‘I wish somebody would come up and tell us something.’

There was a shuddering vibration of the deck then as the Leander’s engine went full ahead. She began to move. Karen glanced off to starboard where the