Our arrangements for the wedding tour included a cruise to the Mediterranean in a yacht lent to Eustace by a friend.

We were both fond of the sea, and we were equally desirous, considering the circumstances under which we had married, of escaping the notice of friends and acquaintances.
With this object in view, having celebrated our marriage privately in London, we had decided on instructing the sailing-master of the yacht to join us at Ramsgate.

At this port (when the season for visitors was at an end) we could embark far more privately than at the popular yachting stations situated in the Isle of Wight.
Three days passed--days of delicious solitude, of exquisite happiness, never to be forgotten, never to be lived over again, to the end of our lives! Early on the morning of the fourth day, just before sunrise, a trifling incident happened, which was noticeable, nevertheless, as being strange to me in my experience of myself.
I awoke, suddenly and unaccountably, from a deep and dreamless sleep with an all-pervading sensation of nervous uneasiness which I had never felt before.

In the old days at the Vicarage my capacity as a sound sleeper had been the subject of many a little harmless joke.

From the moment when my head was on the pillow I had never known what it was to awake until the maid knocked at my door.