I no longer feared to
awaken 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.
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