Winds blew and fell, the sea rose and subsided, the Sybarite trudged on into dull weather.  The sky grew overcast; and Lanyard, daily scanning the very heavens for a sign, accepted this for one, and prayed it might hold.  Nothing could be more calculated to nullify his efforts than to have the landfall happen on a clear, calm night of stars.

He went to bed, the last night out, leaving a noisy gathering in the saloon, and read himself drowsy.  Then turning out his light he slept.  Sometime later he found himself instantaneously awake, and alert, with a clear head and every faculty on the qui vive—­much as a man might grope for a time in a dark strange room, then find a door and step out into broad daylight.

Only there was no light other than in the luminous clarity of his mind.  Even the illumination in the saloon had been dimmed down for the night, as he could tell by the tarnished gleam beneath his stateroom door.

Still, not everyone had gone to bed.  The very manner of his waking informed him that he was not alone; for the life Lanyard had led had taught him to need no better alarm than the entrance of another person into the place where he lay sleeping.  All animals are like that, whose lives hang on their vigilance.

Able to see nothing, he still felt a presence, and knew that it waited, stirless, within arm’s-length of his head.  Without much concern, he thought of Popinot, that “phantom Popinot” of Monk’s derisive naming.

Well, if the vision Liane had seen on deck had taken material form here in his stateroom, Lanyard presumed it meant another fight, and the last, to a finish, that is to say, to a death.

Without making a sound, he gathered himself together, ready for a trap, and as noiselessly lifted a hand toward the switch for the electric light, set in the wall near the head of the bed.  But in the same breath he heard a whisper, or rather a mutter, a voice he could not place in its present pitch.

“Awake, Monsieur Delorme?” it said.  “Hush!  Don’t make a row, and never mind the light.”

His astonishment was so overpowering that instinctively his tensed muscles relaxed and his hand fell back upon the bedding.

“Who the deuce——?”

“Not so loud.  It’s me—­Mussey.”

Lanyard echoed witlessly:  “Mussey?”

“Yes.  I don’t wonder you’re surprised, but if you’ll be easy you’ll understand pretty soon why I had to have a bit of a talk with you without anybody’s catching on.”

“Well,” Lanyard said, “I’m damned!”

“I say!” The subdued mutter took on a note of anxiety.  “It’s all right, isn’t it?  I mean, you aren’t going to kick up a rumpus and spill the beans?  I guess you must think I’ve got a hell of a gall, coming in on you like this, and I don’t know as I blame you, but...  Well, time’s getting short, only two more days at sea, and I couldn’t wait any longer for a chance to have a few minutes’ chin with you.”