elf on the couch closed his
eyes thinking: "I must sleep or I shall go mad."

At times he felt an unshaken confidence in Mrs. Travers--then he
remembered her face. Next moment the face would fade, he would make an
effort to hold on to the image, fail--and then become convinced without
the shadow of a doubt that he was utterly lost, unless he let all these
people be wiped off the face of the earth.

"They all heard that man order me out of his ship," he thought, and
thereupon for a second or so he contemplated without flinching the lurid
image of a massacre. "And yet I had to tell her that not a hair of her
head shall be touched. Not a hair."

And irrationally at the recollection of these words there seemed to be
no trouble of any kind left in the world. Now and then, however, there
were black instants when from sheer weariness he thought of nothing at
all; and during one of these he fell asleep, losing the consciousness
of external things as suddenly as if he had been felled by a blow on the
head.

When he sat up, almost before he was properly awake, his first alarmed
conviction was that he had slept the night through. There was a light in
the cuddy and through the open door of his cabin he saw distinctly Mrs.
Travers pass out of view across the lighted space.

"They did come on board after all," he thought--"how is it I haven't
been called!"

He darted into the cuddy. Nobody! Looking up at the clock in the
skylight he was vexed to see it had stopped till his ear caught the
faint beat of the mechanism. It was going then! He could not have been
asleep more than ten minutes. He had not been on board more than twenty!

So it was only a deception; he had seen no one. And yet he remembered
the turn of the head, the line of the neck, the colour of the hair,
the movement of the passing figure. He returned spiritlessly to his
state-room muttering, "No more sleep for me to-night," and came out
directly, holding a few sheets of paper covered with a high, angular
handwriting.

This was Jorgenson's letter written three days before and entrusted to
Hassim. Lingard had read it already twice, but he turned up the lamp a
little higher and sat down to read it again. On the red shield above his
head the gilt sheaf of thunderbolts darting between the initials of his
name seemed to be aimed straight at the nape of his neck as he sat with
bared elbows spread on the table, poring over the crumpled sheets. The
letter began:

Hassi