I went troubled to bed.

After a long wakefulness, I dozed away into that disturbed vestibule of sleep where the world's happenings mingle with the visions of unconsciousness.

I seemed to see a man's heart beating in his bosom in growing agonies, until, with one last immense palpitation, it burst, and life was gone.

Then the dream changed, and I saw a man in the sea, drowning, who seemed never to drown entirely, his hands ever beating the air and the mocking water.
I thought that I tried many times to throw him a lighted buoy in the half-shadow, but some one held me back, and I knew that a woman's arms were round me.
But at last the drowning man looked up and saw the woman so, and, with a last quiver of the arms, he sank from sight.

When he was gone, the woman's arms dropped away from me; but when I turned to speak to her, she, too, had gone.
I awoke.
Two stewards were talking in the passage, and one was saying, "She'll get under way by daybreak, and it will be a race with the 'Porcupine' to Aden.