The sun was hanging high above the sea ere the young knight in the pavilion upon the hill began to arouse himself from his profound stupor. Being of a healthful body it was his usual habit to start into broad wakefulness, with every faculty alive, equally upon the alert, and ready upon the instant for the work or pleasure that chanced to be forward for the day. So, in this instance, he was wholly unable to account for an extreme heaviness of the eyelids, combined with a sense of oppression that weighed painfully upon his chest. He grew conscious of a foreign odor in his nostrils that seemed to him to be wafted from an incalculably vast distance; and from the same distance was borne to his ears the confused murmuring of many voices. It appeared to Sir Richard that he had been years upon years lying upon his back exerting a vain though ceaseless endeavor to summon together his scattered faculties. He would be aware, in a vague sort of way, that his truant mind was slowly settling upon some solid point of fact. But when it was just about arriving at the spot where memory awaited it, nothing remained but baffling space, and he would discover himself to be again hanging in the awful abyss of Nothingness. For quite a space Sir Richard struggled thus mightily to recover his wits from the enthralling opiate. Slowly, now, the events of the immediate past were coming back to him. The first being that returned to tenant his recreant memory was the gaunt, tall figure of the inn-keeper. Then crept in, stealthily, mysteriously, the misshapen hunchback, Zenas. The fog lifted from off the episode of the hound. "The voice," he whispered. "Ah! the voice! The note--yea, the note! And the precious strip of saffron velvet!" Feebly he thrust his hand within the breast of his doublet and found it there, whereupon he contrived to open his eyes and struggle to his elbow. An expression of indescribable amazement sat upon the young knight's countenance when his eyes encountered, above his head, the waving folds of the purple and black pavilion in the place of the uncovered beams of the room in the Red Tavern in which he had fallen asleep. He looked at the bed, and noted that it was the same, or one exactly similar in pattern. Upon a chair alongside his steel gear had been neatly disposed. De Claverlok had seen to it that it was scrupulously burnished in every part. Sir Richard's headpiece confronted him jauntily from its position upon one of the lower bed-posts. He saw, as he took it up, that its scarlet plume had been daintily curled. Turning it over, he raised the fillet. The message from Isabel was not there.