He was so thoroughly waked by them that a difficulty he always had of remaining in bed when not asleep dictated a relighted candle and a dressing-gown and slippers. It was akin to his aversion to over-comfortable chairs; though he acknowledged beds as proper implements of sleep, sleep being granted. And sleep seemed now so completely out of the question, even if there had been no roaring of the gale and no constant thunder of the seas on the beach below, that Fenwick surrendered at discretion, and gave himself up a helpless prisoner in the grasp of his own past. Not of the whole of it. But of as much as he could face here and now. Another mind that could have commanded some strange insight into the whole of this past, and his power or powerlessness to look it in the face, might have striven to avert its revival. That blow might have been too overwhelming. But there was enough, as we shall see, in the recollection that came back of the decade before his return to England, to make his breath catch and a shudder run through his strong frame as he pressed his palms hard on his eyelids, just as though by so doing he could shut it out. Thank God Rosey was asleep, or would be soon. He would have time to think how he could tell the story he could not be silent about--that, he felt, might be impossible--and yet keep back one ominous portentous fact that had come to him, as a motive force in his former life, without the details of his early history that belonged to it. That fact Rosey must never know, even if ... well!--so many things turned on it. All he could see now--taken by surprise as he was--was that, come what might, that fact should always be kept from _her_. But as to concealing from her his strange experience altogether, that was hardly to be thought of. He would conceal it while he could, though, provisionally. One o'clock by his watch on the dressing-table under the candle. St. Sennans must have struck unheard. No wonder--in this wind! Surely it had rather increased, if anything. Fenwick paced with noiseless care about the little room; he could not be still. The sustained monotone of wind and sea was only crossed now and then by a sound of fall or breakage, to chronicle some little piece of mischief achieved by the former on land, and raise the latter's hopes of some such success in its turn before the night should end....