Sometime, hours later, I awoke, and with a devilish yearning for a smoke. It often takes me that way in the night.
I climbed out in the blackness and found my way into the other room. I remembered exactly where I had dropped my cigarette case when we were fooling with the pajamas by the table, and I found it without difficulty.
In the act of stooping for it, my hand clutched the edge of the table and I felt a spot yield under the pressure of my thumb. It was the button controlling the bell to Jenkins' room.
"Lucky thing he sleeps like a jolly porpoise," I reflected.
I pushed a wicker arm-chair into the moonlight and breeze by a window, and pulling a flame to a cigarette, leaned back, feeling jolly comfy. For the breeze was ripping and delicious, and the delicate silk of the pajamas flowed in little wavelets all the way from my heels to my neck.
And, thinking of the pajamas, I tried to fix my mind on it that I must tell Jenkins to have me write that chap, Mastermann, and send him another lot of those devilish good cigars he liked. I tried to recall what Jenkins had said was the name of the brand—something deuced clever, I remembered that much.
I was just about dropping off, when I heard some one hurrying along the private hall leading from the back. Jenkins himself popped into the room.
"Did you ring, sir?" he inquired, and advanced quickly.
And then, before I could think about it to reply, he halted suddenly, almost pitching forward. Then, with a kind of wheezy howl, he sprang to the wall. Next instant, I was blinking under the dazzling electrolier.
"Here, I say! Shut off that light!" I remonstrated, half blinded.