The dreams began unobtrusively. I remember the first one: I awoke with the feeling that I had been somewhere beneath the sea. The memory of a turgid vision of a watery waste, with things floating. The feeling of it oppressed me all day. There was another. Young Tad Megan, a friend of Arturo’s and mine who had been lost on a surface freighter in one of the disasters of April, 1990, stood in the dream before me. His face was very white; his slowly waving arms seemed floating in water; there was green-black water all around him. Fragments like these. Recurring dreams, always of water--until, as my morbidness grew, I began to hate my calling that took me under the sea--almost grew to fear it. There were dreams of music. Sometimes I thought that I had heard Arturo playing. Often, as I awoke, I fancied I had seen his face, smiling at me with a gentle wistfulness. Again, I saw myself, bloated, drifting in a turgid liquid darkness. It is fearful to be obsessed throughout all one’s waking hours, with the lingering memory of nightmares. I began to fear them--fearing the time when I would have to go to sleep and dream them again. I became nervous; my digestion suffered. In June, when a grave blunder of mine nearly brought disaster upon us, my superior told me bluntly that my work was unsatisfactory, getting more so all the time. He did not know why, and I did not tell him. But I fought with the dreams--fought to thrust them as nonsense out of my waking thoughts. I could not--did not dare--propose marriage to Polly. A sense of personal disaster was upon me. I mistrusted everything. My health--I feared I would lose it, and lose my post. And there was another reason why now I began to avoid Polly. A recurring fragment of dream: A dim cathedral vault of green water with chimes ringing through it. A girl, like Nereid, with tawny floating hair and eyes with the sea in them, calling me, luring me--and always I would try to answer, and would wake up, calling my answer to her. An obsession. I began to feel, even when awake and about my daily duties, the presence of the girl--her eyes upon me, her white arm and hand, flushed with the tint of coral, reaching out to touch me. And against all the reason of my sober waking senses, I knew that in my heart I longed for her. A disloyalty to Polly? I felt it so, and it made me increasingly morbid. * * * * * Of such threads was woven the fabric of those last days of Arturo. I know it now. The lure was on me then, as it had been then upon him. But though I did not realize it, there was a strange but solid basis of science to all this. More than mere dreams; more than mere disturbed fancy. I said nothing to Polly, or to Dr. Plantet, or any one. Like Arturo, I carried it alone. Tad Megan, drowned over a year now, was more and more in my thoughts--as though something were forcing him there. Even more than the alluring girl, the vision of him often came to me as I slept.