"Remember how long you lasted in November, after you'd told me to roll my hoop? Must have been all of twenty-four hours."
"Decidedly," Lanyard observed, "I was unwise to mention murder in your hearing—or would have been, had I seriously entertained any notion of holding out against you, monsieur."
Exultation flickered in Morphew's eyes like northern lights in a moon-blanched sky.
"Then it's a bargain?"
"You would not have wasted time offering it had you thought me insane enough to reject it." Lanyard lifted a hand to plead for silence, while the mellow music of a clock in the hall sang through the early morning stillness. "Five o'clock," he said, rising. "Since we are to be so closely associated henceforth, monsieur, I trust it isn't too much to beg the favour of a bed. It has indeed been a long day for me, my head at present is so dull with drowsiness I am hardly in a condition to go further into this new arrangement . . ."
XX
The sleepiness that Lanyard alleged was no mere subterfuge to end a wearing conversation, the fatigue he felt was all too real, harvest of many toilful days and nights of broken rest, so real that, once he ceased to stave off its creeping paralysis with inflexible resistance, it overwhelmed him of a sudden altogether. It was with something very like the carriage of a somnambulist that he permitted the still sprightly Peter Pagan to lead him from the library, through a maze of corridors and stairs apprehended as in dream, and leave him at last in a lordly bedchamber.
Here by early dawn-light he undressed like an automaton, fell across the bed rather than laid him down upon it, and in a trice was sleeping heavily. . . .
The sun grew so old its level rays struck in at length beneath the window awning and burned his face with a crimson glare till Lanyard started up, bemused, out of a nightmare of stokehold drudgery—only to fancy himself, with that ruddy beam boring through blue shadow to lend colour to the illusion, back in his stateroom on the Port Royal, waiting for the pretty person of Liane Delorme to justify her knuckling of the door.