Because he was tired and rather hysterical, this suddenly amused Traill enormously. He hurst into a peal of laughter.
“I can't help it,” he said, shaking; “you look so funny, so frightfully odd!”
Perrin said nothing. He looked at him for a moment. He had been disturbed in his sleep; he had every reason to be very angry. But he said nothing at all. He moved slowly down the passage.
Traill followed him in silence; he was suddenly frightened.
CHAPTER VI—SÆVA INDIGNATIO
I.
TO Perrin, in his sleep that night there came, accompanied with roaring wind and crashing sea, a dream of the little man in red and black china that lived on the mantelpiece. He came tip-tap across the floor to him and bent over the bed and whispered in his ear. He had grown in his transit and was large in the leg and trailed behind him a long black gown, and he troubled Mr. Perrin by buzzing like a wasp.
He was urging Perrin to do something, but it was hard to distinguish the words because of the booming of the sea. The cold light of early morning and, an hour later, the harsh clang of the bell down the stone passages, restored the china gentleman once more to the mantelpiece; but the discovery that there had been a storm in the night only seemed to confirm the gentleman's appearance. Besides, he was no new thing—he had climbed down from his perch on other occasions.