Alan made no movement to follow.  His brain cleared itself of shock, and a strange calmness began to possess him.  “You are quite sure it was the girl at my table?” he found himself saying.  “Is it possible you might be mistaken?”

“No,” said the woman.  “She was so quiet and pretty that I have noticed her often.  I saw her clearly in the starlight.  And she saw me just before she climbed to the rail and jumped.  I’m almost sure she smiled at me and was going to speak.  And then—­then—­she was gone!”

“I didn’t know until my wife screamed,” added the man.  “I was seated facing her at the time.  I ran to the rail and could see nothing behind but the wash of the ship.  I think she went down instantly.”

Alan turned.  He thrust himself silently through a crowd of excited and questioning people, but he did not hear their questions and scarcely sensed the presence of their voices.  His desire to make great haste had left him, and he walked calmly and deliberately to the cabin where Mary Standish would be if the woman was mistaken, and it was not she who had leaped into the sea.  He knocked at the door only once.  Then he opened it.  There was no cry of fear or protest from within, and he knew the room was empty before he turned on the electric light.  He had known it from the beginning, from the moment he heard the woman’s scream.  Mary Standish was gone.

He looked at her bed.  There was the depression made by her head in the pillow.  A little handkerchief lay on the coverlet, crumpled and twisted.  Her few possessions were arranged neatly on the reading table.  Then he saw her shoes and her stockings, and a dress on the bed, and he picked up one of the shoes and held it in a cold, steady hand.  It was a little shoe.  His fingers closed about it until it crushed like paper.

He was holding it when he heard someone behind him, and he turned slowly to confront Captain Rifle.  The little man’s face was like gray wax.  For a moment neither of them spoke.  Captain Rifle looked at the shoe crumpled in Alan’s hand.

“The boats got away quickly,” he said in a husky voice.  “We stopped inside the third-mile.  If she can swim—­there is a chance.”

“She won’t swim,” replied Alan.  “She didn’t jump in for that.  She is gone.”

In a vague and detached sort of way he was surprised at the calmness of his own voice.  Captain Rifle saw the veins standing out on his clenched hands and in his forehead.  Through many years he had witnessed tragedy of one kind and another.  It was not strange to him.  But a look of wonderment shot into his eyes at Alan’s words.  It took only a few seconds to tell what had happened the preceding night, without going into details.  The captain’s hand was on Alan’s arm when he finished, and the flesh under his fingers was rigid and hard as steel.

“We’ll talk with Rossland after the boats return,” he said.

He drew Alan from the room and closed the door.