There was no one in sight. She turned into the thwartships passageway, went on past the entrance to the dining saloon on her left, and stepped out on deck on the port side. This level, referred to in the usual grandiose language of travel brochures as the promenade deck, contained the eight passenger cabins, the steward’s cabin, and the passenger dining and smoking saloons. On the next deck below were the crew’s quarters and messrooms, while the deck officers and engineers occupied the one directly above, along with their messroom and the wireless room. Passengers were encouraged to stay in their own area, except that they were allowed on the boat deck, the uppermost one, as long as they kept clear of the bridge.

She went around to the ladders at the after end of the midships house and mounted to the boat deck, which was in darkness except for the faint moonlight, since the bridge was at the forward end of it. Between the two wings of the bridge was the wheelhouse, the rest of the structure aft of it containing the chartroom and captain’s quarters. She walked forward and stood leaning against the rail between the davits of the two lifeboats on the starboard side, gazing out at the star-studded night and the dark, unmoving surface of the sea.

Three 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 out 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 coordinated, and there was in all his mannerisms and in the rattier 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.