He was asked to come again, to come often and take part in the counsels of all these people captivated by the sentimental enterprise of a declared love.  On taking Miss Moorsom’s hand he looked up, would have liked to say something, but found himself voiceless, with his lips suddenly sealed.  She returned the pressure of his fingers, and he left her with her eyes vaguely staring beyond him, an air of listening for an expected sound, and the faintest possible smile on her lips.  A smile not for him, evidently, but the reflection of some deep and inscrutable thought.

CHAPTER IV

He went on board his schooner.  She lay white, and as if suspended, in the crepuscular atmosphere of sunset mingling with the ashy gleam of the vast anchorage.  He tried to keep his thoughts as sober, as reasonable, as measured as his words had been, lest they should get away from him and cause some sort of moral disaster.  What he was afraid of in the coming night was sleeplessness and the endless strain of that wearisome task.  It had to be faced however.  He lay on his back, sighing profoundly in the dark, and suddenly beheld his very own self, carrying a small bizarre lamp, reflected in a long mirror inside a room in an empty and unfurnished palace.  In this startling image of himself he recognised somebody he had to follow—­the frightened guide of his dream.  He traversed endless galleries, no end of lofty halls, innumerable doors.  He lost himself utterly—­he found his way again.  Room succeeded room.  At last the lamp went out, and he stumbled against some object which, when he stooped for it, he found to be very cold and heavy to lift.  The sickly white light of dawn showed him the head of a statue.  Its marble hair was done in the bold lines of a helmet, on its lips the chisel had left a faint smile, and it resembled Miss Moorsom.  While he was staring at it fixedly, the head began to grow light in his fingers, to diminish and crumble to pieces, and at last turned into a handful of dust, which was blown away by a puff of wind so chilly that he woke up with a desperate shiver and leaped headlong out of his bed-place.  The day had really come.  He sat down by the cabin table, and taking his head between his hands, did not stir for a very long time.

Very quiet, he set himself to review this dream.  The lamp, of course, he connected with the search for a man.  But on closer examination he perceived that the reflection of himself in the mirror was not really the true Renouard, but somebody else whose face he could not remember.  In the deserted palace he recognised a sinister adaptation by his brain of the long corridors with many doors, in the great building in which his friend’s newspaper was lodged on the first floor.  The marble head with Miss Moorsom’s face!  Well!  What other face could he have dreamed of?  And her complexion was fairer than Parian marble, than the heads of angels.  The wind at the end was the morning breeze entering through the open porthole and touching his face before the schooner could swing to the chilly gust.