one too far.

* * * * *

I was standing by the door of my disgraceful little bedroom, dressed
for walking, when I saw him again. He was mounting the broad stairs
with his head bent, and not wishing to pass the man on my way down, I
waited till he had disappeared within the door of his room. That door,
with the width of the house between, was directly opposite mine. As it
opened, there came to me the first glimmer of the light which was to
burst on me in all its terrible force a minute later.

When he had reappeared, in his great loose grey flannels, his straw hat
on his head, a book in his hand, and had gone downstairs, I flew along
the corridor and pushed open the door of the room he had left.
Berthalina, it was the room of my dream! Those details which had
impressed themselves so clearly on my sleeping vision last night were
here in the flesh--well not exactly in the flesh, but--. I stood at the
window, wide open from the bottom; the sea lay sparkling in the
sunlight--

Of course, you remember the time when I stayed with you, my dear
friend, after that crisis in my stupid life of which you and only one
other knew? You haven't forgotten how I terrified you nearly to death
by walking in my sleep to your room? and how, afterwards, you insisted
on keeping the key of my bedroom door under your own pillow? To the
best of my belief I have never sleep-walked either before or since that
time. The certainty came to me now, as I stood at the man's window,
that I had done it again last night!

* * * * *

"And what have you been doing with yourself, all day?"

I had turned my back on the pier bands, on the crowds of the esplanade,
and had wandered as far as my legs would carry me along the beach--a
hard, smooth beach of yellow sand--and was sitting there, with only the
waves for company, when the voice of the man I had successfully dodged
all day spoke at my back.

"You were not at lunch, nor at the table d'hote, to-night," he added;
and I did not consider that the statement demanded comment.

He came and sat beside me, and gathered up his knees into his arms and
looked out to sea. "I suppose the beach is free to all?" he remarked;
and my silence did not gainsay him.

"I am like you," he went on: "I care nothing for all that," he jerked
his head in the direction of the town and the populace. "I'm never
afraid of my own company. And you?"