Much comforted and refreshed he rose from his knees, and went to one of the windows that looked out over the Thames.
He pulled aside the heavy green curtain, and saw that a clear colourless light immediately began to flow and flood into the room.
It was not yet dawn, but that mysterious hour which immediately presages the dawn had come.
The river was like a livid streak of pewter, the leafless plane-trees of the embankment seemed like delicate tracery of iron in the faint half-light. London was sleeping still.
The writer felt very calm and quiet as he turned away from the window and moved towards his bedroom.
The fire was nearly dead, but he saw the silver cigarette-case upon the rug and picked it up. He went to bed with the case under his pillow, and this is what he dreamed—
He saw Guy Rathbone in a position of extreme peril and danger. The circumstances were not defined, what the actual peril might be was not revealed. But Megbie knew that Rathbone was communicating with his brain while he slept. Rathbone was living somewhere. He was captive in the hands of enemies, he was trying to "get through" to the brain of some one who could help him.
The journalist only slept for a few short hours. He rose refreshed in body and with an unalterable conviction in his mind. The events of the last night were real. No chance or illusion had sent the vision and the dream, and the innocent-looking cigarette-case that lay upon the table, and which had come into his hands so strangely, was the pivot upon which strange events had turned.
The little silver thing was surrounded by as black and impenetrable a mystery as ever a man had trodden into unawares.
And in the broad daylight, when all that was fantastic and unreal was banished from thought, Megbie knew quite well towards whom his thoughts tended, on what remarkable and inscrutable personality his dreadful suspicions had begun to focus themselves.