Archie put the paper with its well-remembered, upright handwriting back on the table again, lay back in his long chair, drowsy, and fatigued after his spell of fiery writing. Almost at once sleep began to invade him; the outline of the stone-pine, etched against the sky, grew blurred as his eyelids fluttered and closed. And then, without pause or transition, he saw a white statue standing close to him, on the neck of which there wriggled the tail of a worm, protruding from the fair white surface, and instantly his forgotten dream leaped into his mind, with a pang of horror. That was what his dream had been: there had been a statue standing just there, white in the moonlight, and even as he worshipped and adored it with love and boundless admiration, those foul symbols of decay had wreathed about it. Next moment he plucked himself from his dozing, and there was no statue there at all, but the far more comfortable figure of Jessie, standing in its place, with laughter in her eye. "Oh, that's what you do, Archie," she said, "when you pretend to come out into the garden to work, and despise Harry and me for sleeping." Archie jumped up from his chair and brandished in her face the pages of his consciously written manuscript. The leaf on which the message from Martin was written still lay apart from those on the table. "I may have closed my eyes for one second," he said. "But I've written all that since lunch. Oh, it's got the sea in it, Jessie; I really believe there's the sea there. I'll read it you this evening, if you'll apologize for saying that I go to sleep instead of writing." She picked up the other leaf. "Yes, I apologize," she said, "though you were asleep when I came out. But I want to hear what you've written, so I apologize for having thought so. And there's this other page as well." Archie took it from her. "That doesn't belong," he said. "That--" He paused a moment. "Do you remember what I told you about the messages I used to have from Martin when I was a child?" he asked. Jessie nodded. "Yes; and they have ceased altogether for years, haven't they?" she said quickly. "Until to-day. Just now, half an hour ago, I had another. But I can't make anything out of it. He tells me that I've had a warning. I don't know what it means." Jessie felt all the habitual contempt of the thoroughly normal and healthy mind for anything akin to psychical experiences. All ghosts, in her view, were to be classed under the headings of rats or lobster-salad; all such things as table-tappings and the doings of mediums under the heading of trickery. But, knowing what she did of Archie's childish experiences, she could not put them down as trickery, and so was unable exactly to despise them as fraudulent. For that very reason she rather feared them; they made her feel uncomfortable. She glanced at the paper he held out to her, but without taking it.