en to find a knife at my throat, no longer dreaded the darkness as
a foe.

So that the voice may have been calling (indeed, _had_ been calling)
for some time, and of this I had been hazily conscious before finally
I awoke. Then, ere the new sense of security came to reassure me, the
old sense of impending harm set my heart leaping nervously. There is
always a certain physical panic attendant upon such awakenings in the
still of night, especially in novel surroundings. Now I sat up
abruptly, clutching at the rail of my berth and listening.

There was a soft thudding on my cabin door, and a voice, low and
urgent, was crying my name.

Through the port-hole the moonlight streamed into my room, and save
for a remote and soothing throb, inseparable from the progress of a
great steamship, nothing else disturbed the stillness; I might have
floated lonely upon the bosom of the Mediterranean. But there was the
drumming on the door again, and the urgent appeal:

"Dr. Petrie! Dr. Petrie!"

I threw off the bedclothes and stepped on to the floor of the cabin,
fumbling hastily for my slippers. A fear that something was amiss,
that some aftermath, some wraith of the dread Chinaman, was yet to
come to disturb our premature peace, began to haunt me. I threw open
the door.

Upon the gleaming deck, blackly outlined against a wondrous sky,
stood a man who wore a blue greatcoat over his pyjamas, and whose
unstockinged feet were thrust into red slippers. It was Platts, the
Marconi operator.

"I'm awfully sorry to disturb you, Dr. Petrie," he said, "and I was
even less anxious to arouse your neighbour; but somebody seems to be
trying to get a message, presumably urgent, through to you."

"To me!" I cried.

"I cannot make it out," admitted Platts, running his fingers through
dishevelled hair, "but I thought it better to arouse you. Will you
come up?"

I turned without a word, slipped into my dressing-gown, and with
Platts passed aft along the deserted deck. The sea was as calm as a
great lake. Ahead, on the port bow, an angry flambeau burnt redly
beneath the peaceful vault of the heavens. Platts nodded absently in
the direction of the weird flames.

"Stromboli," he said; "we shall be nearly through the Straits by
breakfast-time."

We mounted the narrow stair to the Marconi deck. At the table sat
Platts' assistant with the Marconi attachment upon his head--an
apparatus which always set me thinking of the electric chair.

"Have