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any mirror, that they must be terribly bloodshot; he was suffering every symptom of a first-class hangover.
    That was no new sensation as during the last year or two he had gone to bed in varying degrees of tightness more often than not. However, he was still young and blessed with a good constitution, so his drinking had not yet seriously undermined his health and he knew just what he wanted to make himself his own man again—a good hot bath with its accompanying rituals, andtwo large cups of China tea. Thus fortified he would normally have appeared spruce, amiable, and ready to talk with reasonable intelligence to anyone congenial.
    His eyes had not been open ten seconds when he realised that his chances of obtaining either a hot bath or China tea were about as remote as his coming into another comfortable fortune like that the rash expenditure of which was the prime cause of his being where he was at the moment.
    When he had tilted that half-bottle of brandy down his throat before abandoning ship he had been convinced they were all about to die. He remembered feeling strangely sober when they piled into the boat; but shortly afterwards the huge quantity of neat spirit, taken at a draught on top of all he had drunk before, had done its work; he had lapsed into a drunken stupor. Now, it seemed, by some act of God or fantastic freak of chance, the boat had not gone down after all. He was ill, wretchedly ill, but still very much alive—that was quite certain.
    De Brissac’s body lay stretched out at full length beside him. During the night someone had tied a handkerchief round the Frenchman’s head and in the dawn light patches of dried blood stood out darkly on it. His handsome face was a chalk-blue and he lay so still it seemed certain he was dead. Basil stretched out a hand and touched him gently on the shoulder.
    ‘Leave him alone, you young fool,’ growled Colonel Carden. ‘Can’t you see he’s sleeping?’ The old man was wide awake, having only dropped into an uneasy doze just before the dawn. His daughter, in spite of the apparent discomfort of her position, bent over at an angle, was sleeping soundly, with her head in his lap.
    Basil murmured an apology, rolled his tongue round his evil-tasting mouth, and lifted himself back on to the seat from which he had slipped. He was already beginning to feel that Fate would have been kinder to allow him to drown while dead drunk on good Hennessy rather than to preserve him for the sort of end he could expect in an open boat at sea. There was, he supposed, an outside chance that they might be picked up, but the unnatural existence he had led for the past two years had veiled his naturally cheerful nature with a pessimistic outlook.
    At the sound of Colonel Garden’s growling reprimand, Vicente Vedras sat up with a start. He had been dreaming of all the gold that lay under his brother’s farm in South Africa. In the dream he had already sold his coffee business in Venezuela and returnedwith the money to Johannesburg. The two of them had bought all the necessary mining machinery and installed it; they were actually drilling the new reef which would make them both multimillionaires. He had been telling his brother how wise he had been to send for him, Vicente, instead of getting the capital, which he needed to exploit his discovery, from strangers. Now they would keep it all in the family. All that rich, red gold that would buy women and cattle and plantations, and women and horses, and yet more women.
    Vicente stared across the boat at Synolda, sleeping still. Her golden hair, escaped from under a sou’wester, tumbled about her white face and neck. That one first, he thought, she is lovely—lovely as the Madonna in the painting that hangs in the side chapel of the church at El Perso. Then he shivered in his sodden clothes and wakened to grim reality. His dark eyes became shadowed and he began to wring his hands.
    Luvia had stood up to get a wider view and was searching