e by lay my lovely crystal flask of "Campagna Violets,"
empty. I could get no more anywhere, and it had cost five pounds! I
could hardly breathe in the room. Oh, evidently a stewardess must have
gone stark mad, or else some practical joker had waited to play the
_coup_ until the stewardesses were in bed!

As I thought this, my eyes as well as my nostrils warned me of something
strange. The rose-coloured silk curtains which, when I went to dinner,
had been gracefully looped back at head and foot of my pretty bed (a
real bed, not a mere berth!) were now closely drawn with a secretive
air. This made me imagine that it was a practical joke I had to deal
with, and my fancy flew to all sorts of weird surprises, any one of
which I might find hidden behind the draperies.

I trust that I have a sense of humour, and I can laugh at a jest against
myself as well as any woman, perhaps better than most. But to-night I
was in no mood to laugh at jests, and I wondered how anybody had the
heart (not to mention the _cheek_!) to perpetrate one after the shock we
had experienced. Besides, I couldn't think of a person likely to play a
trick on me. Certainly my host wouldn't do so. Shelagh, my best and most
intimate pal, was far too gentle and sensitive-minded. As for the other
guests, none were of the noisy, bounding type who take liberties even
with distant acquaintances, for fun.

All this ran through my mind, as a cinema "cut-in" flashes across the
screen; and it wasn't until I'd passed in review the characters of my
fellow guests that I summoned courage to pull back the bed-curtains.
When I did so, I gave a jerk that slipped them along the rod as far as
they would go. And then--I saw the last thing in the world I could have
pictured.

A woman, fully dressed, was stretched on the pink silk coverlet fast
asleep, her head deep sunk in the embroidered pillow.

It was all I could do to keep back a cry--for this was no woman I had
seen on board, not even a drunken or sleep-walking stewardess. Yet her
face was not strange to me. That was the most horrible, the most
mysterious part! There was no mistake, for the face was impossible to
forget. As I stared, almost believing that I dreamed, another scene rose
between my eyes and the dainty little cabin of the _Naiad_.

It also was a scene in a dream. I knew it was a dream, but it was
torturingly vivid. I was a prisoner on a German submarine, in war-time,
and signals from my own old home--Cou