bells struck in the wheelhouse, repeated a few seconds later by the lookout on the fo’c’sle head. It was one thirty. The lookout reported the running lights, and was acknowledged by the second officer, whose shadowy figure she could see on the starboard wing of the bridge. For a moment she considered walking forward far enough to ask him why they were stopped, but decided against it. He was a dour and taciturn man she had seen only once or twice since she’d been aboard, and she wasn’t even sure he spoke much English. The chief mate was the only one of the officers she knew, since he sometimes ate in the passengers’ saloon, along with the captain.

From the engine room ventilators behind her issued the faint pulsing sounds of the generator and sanitary pump, but aside from these the ship was caught up in an almost total silence. There wasn’t the whisper of a breeze, and no movement at all. She could be standing on a pier, she thought, or a seawall. She looked down. When the ship was under way at night here in the tropics she loved to watch the glowing sheet of light along its skin, but it was absent now that there was no disturbance of the water, and there were only random pinpoints of phosphorescence winking on and off like fireflies in the darkness. She leaned on the rail and stared moodily off into the night. After a while she heard footsteps coming across the deck behind her, and turned. It was the chief mate.

Even in the darkness it was impossible to mistake that figure. He must be six feet four, she thought; at any rate he dwarfed everyone else aboard, not only tall but massive of shoulder, with powerful arms and a big, craggy head and wild mop of blond hair that seemed to fly outward as though charged by some endless source of energy within him. In spite of his size, he moved with the casual ease of the perfectly co-ordinated, and there was in all his mannerisms and in the rather sardonic, ice-blue eyes a sort of total male confidence that no doubt innumerable women had found attractive. She wondered what he was doing up at this hour, since he didn’t go on watch until four. Maybe he was the man— She wrenched her mind away from this speculation with distaste.

He saw her between the boats and stopped. ‘Ready to abandon ship, Mrs. Brooke? Stick around; we can still beat the lifeboats.’

She smiled. ‘I was just out admiring the night. I woke up when the engines stopped.’

‘Everybody does. Sudden silence is a noise.’

‘Is it anything serious?’

‘No, just a hot bearing. The galley slaves say we’ll be under way in a half hour or so.’

She took out a cigarette. ‘The who?’

He snapped the lighter for her, and grinned. ‘Engine room. The first marine engineer was a convict with an oar.’

He went on toward the bridge, and she resumed her silent contemplation of the night. He was an unusual man in a number of ways, she thought; he was obviously well educated, and she knew he spoke fluent French and German in addition to English. She didn’t know what his nationality was. The Leander was under Panamanian registry, but her crew was from everywhere. His name was Eric Lind, so he was probably of Scandinavian descent, as she was herself.

Then it was her own reaction—or utter lack of it—that she was thinking of. What woman, talking to a devilishly attractive man in the moonlight, even if she had no interest in him at all, would indifferently invite inspection in the revealing, close-up flame of a cigarette lighter when her hair looked like a fright wig and her face like something that had been stored for the winter in a coat of grease? You’re hopeless, she thought.

* * *

The ship loomed large and distinct ahead of him now, and he knew he was within a quarter mile. She was still lying motionless in the water, but had swung around by imperceptible degrees during the past hour until she was broadside to him, and he could see the green glow of her starboard running light as well as the overall silhouette and a few lighted portholes. She was a freighter, with well-decks forward and aft of the big midships house, and whatever her trouble was it must be in the engine room. There was no sign of fire, or activity of any kind on deck.

Sweat