‘He has dreamt this,’ said I, ‘or it is some wretched trick of the sight or brains; but I would rather believe it a dream.’ ‘It is an illusion of some kind, no doubt,’ she exclaimed, ‘but it is strange that it should occur, be the cause what it will, on two successive nights, and much about the same time. No wonder the poor fellow is depressed this morning. It is not only that he fears this warning as signifying that something is seriously wrong with baby, and that it is a mysterious command to him to return to her at once; he dreads that it may occur again to-night and to-morrow night, continuously, indeed, until it actually drives him mad by obliging him to make up his mind either to neglect his child or to abandon his pursuit of his wife.’ ‘The long and short of it is, Miss Jennings,’ said I, ‘that when it comes to one’s being thrown with a man whose mind is a misfit that’s apt to shift like an ill-stowed cargo to any breeze of wind that heels the craft over, one must “stand by,” as sailors say, for troublesome half-hours and bewilderingly unexpected confrontments.’ But there was no use in my telling her the wish was strong in my mind that if it was to be Wilfrid’s unhappy destiny to grow worse, then the sooner he acted in such a way as to force all hands to see that it would be at his own as well as at our peril to leave him at large and to suffer him to preserve control over the movements of the yacht, and by consequence the lives and fortunes of those who sailed in her, the better; for I protest that even in the thick of my talk with the girl, I never sent a glance at the white roll of spinning waters twisting and roaring away alongside without a sense of the absurdity of the whole business, the aimlessness of the pursuit, the futility of it as a project of revenge, its profound idleness as a scheme of recovering Lady Monson, guessing, as anyone could from my cousin’s talk and from what Laura Jennings had let fall, that if Wilfrid _should_ succeed in regaining his wife, he wouldn’t know what in the world to do with her! CHAPTER XIII. I INTERPRET THE WARNING. The strong wind blew throughout the day and the yacht made a gallant run, floating buoyant in foam from one blue knoll to another, with nothing living outside our decks saving a grey gull that overhung the seething line torn up by the furrow of our keel. A bright look-out was kept aloft; rarely did I send a glance that way but that I saw one or another of the men whose duty lay in overhanging the topgallant-yard sweeping the windy sallow sky against which the ridged horizon was beating, with Wilfrid’s polished, lance-bright tube.