e stirred drowsily, shifted, and discovered a cramp in his
legs, the pain of which more effectually aroused him. He rose, yawned,
stretched, grimaced with the ache in his stiffened limbs, and went to
the kitchen door.

There was no way to tell how long he had slept. The night held
black--the moon not yet up. The bonfire had burned down to a great
glowing heap of embers. The wind was faint, a mere whisper in the void.
There was a famous show of stars, clear, bright, cold and distant.

Closing and locking the door, he found another lamp, lighted it, and
took it with him to the corner bedchamber, where he lay down without
undressing. He had, indeed, nothing to change to.

A heavy lethargy weighed upon his faculties. No longer desperately
sleepy, he was yet far from rested. His body continued to demand repose,
but his mind was ill at ease.

He napped uneasily throughout the night, sleeping and waking by fits and
starts, his brain insatiably occupied with an interminable succession of
wretched dreams. The mad, distorted face of Drummond, bleached and
degraded by his slavery to morphine, haunted Whitaker's consciousness
like some frightful and hideous Chinese mask. He saw it in a dozen
guises, each more pitiful and terrible than the last. It pursued him
through eons of endless night, forever at his shoulder, blind and
weeping. Thrice he started from his bed, wide awake and glaring,
positive that Drummond had been in the room but the moment gone.... And
each time that he lay back and sleep stole in numbing waves through his
brain, he passed into subconsciousness with the picture before his eyes
of a seething cloud of gulls seen against the sky, over the edge of a
cliff.

He was up and out in the cool of dawn, before sunrise, delaying to
listen for some minutes at the foot of the stairway. But he heard no
sound in that still house, and there was no longer the night to affright
the woman with hinted threats of nameless horrors lurking beneath its
impenetrable cloak. He felt no longer bound to stand sentinel on the
threshold of her apprehensions. He went out.

The day would be clear: he drew promise of this from the gray bowl of
the sky, cloudless, touched with spreading scarlet only on its eastern
rim. There was no wind; from the cooling ashes of yesternight's
beacon-fire a slim stalk of smoke grew straight and tall before it
wavered and broke. The voice of the sea had fallen to a muffled
throbbing.

In the white magic