Allan's short sleep was a restless one, for there came before him a vivid recollection or vision of Hawke Holcroft, and his pale face, with its last expression of horror and despair, as the waves closed over it and sucked him down.
A little cry that escaped him made Cameron look his way, and he saw a man, in the dim light without, regarding Allan with a fixed and hostile expression. He was clad somewhat like a European, but wore a tarboosh, with a blue tassel, and had a voluminous beard; and his eyes seemed savage and sinister in expression.
It is said that there is some mysterious and magnetic force in a long and fixed stare or gaze; and there is, it is also said, 'within us some vigilant quality that is only exercised when every other faculty is at rest, that permits all ordinary sounds to pass unheeded while we sleep, but that instinctively sounds the alarm when anything unusual or fraught with danger is at hand.'
Be all that as it may, Allan suddenly awoke, and started up, and the watcher as suddenly vanished, but not before his pale and sinister face had been seen by the wakener.
Cameron sprang out on the balcony. There was no one there, save his comrade, and it was evident that the lurker must have passed into the hotel by some other window.
'A dream,' muttered Allan, looking rather confused, 'a dream of that wretch Holcroft. Why should his face haunt me? I did not kill him—he drowned himself; and I need have no more remorse for that affair than for pistoling the fellow who shot poor Carslogie.'
'Whether the cause of your dream or not,' said Cameron, who was too genuine a Highlander to be without a considerable spice of superstition in his nature, 'a fellow lurked beside you whose look I little liked.'
'What was his appearance?'
'Difficult to describe in the dim light, but the gleam of his eyes was sinister. Some disbanded Egyptian turned thief, most likely. But he bolted the moment I approached, and you awoke.'
'All this is a strange coincidence,' said Allan, as he lit another cigar; and they turned their steps towards the camp without the walls. 'But I am not much given to dreaming, and our work has been too hard for some time past for indulgence in long naps, yet I had a strange and creeping sense of some evil presence near me, with a pain that was strange and intolerable.'