a solitary mind suffered tribulation. But into the small hours Henry
Lennox endured the companionship of disquiet thoughts. He could not
sleep, and his brain, clear enough, retraced no passage from the past
day. Indeed the events of the day had sunk into remote time. He was only
concerned with the present, and he wondered while he worried that he
should be worrying. Yet a proleptic instinct made him look forward. He
had neither lied nor exaggerated to May. From the moment of losing the
toss, he honestly experienced a strong, subjective impression of danger
arising out of the proposed attack on the mysteries of the Grey Room.
It was, indeed, that consciousness of greater possibilities in the
adventure than May admitted or imagined which made Lennox so insistent.
Looking back, he perceived many things, and chiefly that he had taken a
wrong line, and approached Mary's husband from a fatal angle. Too late
he recognized his error. It was inevitable that a hint of suspected
danger would confirm the sailor in his resolution; and that such a hint
should follow the spin of the coin against Lennox, and be accompanied by
the assurance that, had he won, Henry would have proceeded, despite his
intuitions, to do what he now begged Tom not to do--that was a piece of
clumsy work which he deeply regretted.

At the hour when his own physical forces were lowest, his errors of
diplomacy forced themselves upon his mind. He wasted much time, as all
men do upon their beds, in anticipating to-morrow; in considering what
is going to happen, or what is not; in weighing their own future words
and deeds given a variety of contingencies. For reason, which at first
kept him, despite his disquiet, in the region of the rational, grew
weaker with Henry as the night advanced; the shadow of trouble deepened
as his weary wits lost their balance to combat it. The premonition was
as formless and amorphous as a cloud, and, though he could not see any
shape to his fear, or define its limitations, it grew darker ere he
slept. He considered what might happen and, putting aside any lesser
disaster, tried to imagine what the morning would bring if May actually
succumbed.

For the moment the size of such an imaginary disaster served curiously
to lessen his uneasiness. Pushed to extremities, the idea became merely
absurd. He won a sort of comfort from such an outrageous proposition,
because it brought him back to the solid ground of reason and the
assurance that s