I walked to the taffrail and looked astern. There was nothing to be seen but faint phantasmal sheets of phosphoric light softly undulating, with the brighter glow of our wake. I was really more agitated than I should have liked to own, and I must have stood for nearly a quarter of an hour speculating upon the incident and striving to reassure myself. One thought led to another and presently I found myself starting to a sudden odd suspicion that came into my head with the vivid gleam of a broad space of the sea-glow that flashed out bright as though it reflected a lantern hung over the side from the run of the yacht where the bends hollowed in from the sternpost. It was a suspicion that had no reference whatever to the voice that Crimp and I had heard, yet it did me good by drawing my mind away from that bit of preternaturalism, and a few minutes later I found myself below alongside of Miss Jennings. ‘The cigar you lighted to-night must have been an unusually big one,’ said she with a light glance, in which, however, it was easy to see that she noted my expression was something different from what was usual in me. I smiled, and measuring on my finger, told her that I had smoked but that much of the cigar and thrown the rest of it overboard. Wilfrid sat at the table with a tumbler of seltzer and brandy before him, and he was filling his large meerschaum pipe as I arrived. ‘Help yourself, Charles,’ said he, pointing to the swing tray that was full of decanters. ‘I was about to join you on deck. How goes the night?’ ‘Dark, but fine; the wind just a small pleasant air. I am tired, or I should accompany you.’ ‘We are sailing though, I hope,’ said he. ‘Ay, some four knots or thereabouts, and heading our course. We have no right to grumble. It has blown a fine gale all day, and from the hour of our start down to the present moment I think we have had fairer weather and brisker breezes than we had a right to hope for.’ He emptied his tumbler, lighted his pipe, and said that he would go and take a turn or two. ‘If I should loiter,’ he added, ‘don’t sit up. If I am not to sleep when I turn in, the night will be all too long for me were I to go to bed at four o’clock in the morning.’ As he mounted the cabin steps I rose to mix a glass of seltzer and brandy, and when I returned to my seat near Miss Jennings, she at once said, ‘I hope nothing has happened to worry you, Mr. Monson?’ ‘Why do you ask?’ ‘You had a slightly troubled look when you came into the cabin just now.’ ‘What will you think,’ said I, ‘if I tell you that _I_ have had a warning?’ Her eyes glittered to the rounding of the brows, and her lips parted as though with a sigh of surprise. I shook my head, looking with a smile at her. ‘I see how it is. If I am candid, you will think there are _two_ instead of one!’ ‘No, no,’ she cried.