A moment later he was thinking, "I'm getting light-headed, and shall be making an ass of myself if I'm not careful. I'm certainly not in my usual health. What the deuce is the matter with me? When, I wonder, shall I have news of Jim's arrival?"
When Piecraft left the church he was in a state of acute depression and distress. His pulse was throbbing and his head aching, and it seemed to him as he paced the streets that the preacher was following close behind him, and constantly repeating the question, "Where is James, where is James?" Sometimes the voice would sound like a distant echo, sometimes like a mocking cry.
On reaching home he said to his housekeeper: "Mrs Avory, I shall be glad if you will sit up till you hear me go to bed. For the first time in my life I am afraid of being left alone. I can't imagine what has come over me."
He tried to read the paper, to write a letter, to play the piano; paced the floor; wandered into the housekeeper's sitting-room; went out for a walk and came back after going twenty yards. Then he took up a volume of his favourite Arabian Nights and found, after reading a page, that he had not understood a sentence of the print. Towards midnight his agitation was so great that he could bear it no longer. He rang the bell.
"Mrs Avory," he said, "something has gone wrong with me—or with somebody else. I can't help thinking about James—and fancying all sorts of things. I believe I am going mad. In heaven's name, what am I to do?"
"Well, sir," said the woman, "you are a doctor and should know better than I. But if I were you, sir, I'd take a sleeping draught and go to bed."
In despair Piecraft took the woman's advice. As a doctor he avoided the use of every kind of drug on principle, and was terrified when he realised how much morphia he had put into the draught. "Now indeed I am mad," he thought, "for the smallest dose of morphia was always enough to give me the horrors."
His fears were not ungrounded. There is no record of what he saw, fancied, or suffered during the night and the following day; but when he entered his dining-room late next evening, Mrs Avory started as though she had seen a ghost. "Give me the newspaper," he cried, and before she could prevent him he snatched it out of her hand.
"'Titanic' sinks after collision with iceberg. Enormous loss of life"—were the first words he read.
"I knew it!" he exclaimed.