She sat by the lamp on the sitting-room table, looking out over the veranda at the pitch blackness of a breathless night in which not even the mild beat of the surf could be heard. She might have been in some far Pacific desert island. Her book lay on her lap—the second volume of Motley’s _Dutch Republic_. All the Alvas and Williams, all the heroes and villains, all the soldiers and politicians and burghers were comfortably dead hundreds of years ago. What did these dead men matter, when one living man, the equal of them all, had gone forth from her, into the unknowableness of the night? Myra came into the room with an amorphous bundle in her hand. “The camp bed in the dressing-room isn’t very comfortable—but I suppose I can sleep on it.” Olivia turned swiftly in her chair, startled into human realities. “No. It’s a beast of a thing. But I should love to have you to be with me. You’re a dear. You sleep in my bed and I’ll take the dressing-room.” “You once gave signs of being a woman of sense,” said Myra tonelessly. “It seems I was mistaken.” She disappeared with her bundle. Olivia put out the light and went to bed, where she lay awake all the night, fantastically widowed, striving with every nerve and every brain-cell to picture the contemporaneous situation of her husband. Three o’clock in the morning. He would be in mid-Channel. Had he secured a berth? Or was he forced to walk up and down the steamer’s deck? Thank Heaven, it was a black still night. She stole out of bed and looked at the sea. A sea of oil. It was something to be grateful for. But the poor boy without his watch—the watch which had marked for him the laggard minutes of captivity, the racing hours of approaching death, the quiet, rhythmic companion and recorder of his amazing life. She forced all her will power to sleep; but the blank of him there on the infinite expanse of mattress she felt like a frost. The dawn found her with wide and sleepless eyes. And while she was picturing this marvel among men standing by the steamer’s side in the night, in communion with the clear and heavy stars, holding in his adventurous grasp the secret of a world’s peace, Alexis Triona was speeding northwards, sitting upright in a third-class carriage, to Newcastle-on-Tyne. And at Newcastle he expected no ship to take him to Finland. Lucky if he found a cab in the early morning to take him to his destination three miles away. For the telegram which he had torn to pieces had not come from the War Office. It was not written in Russian. It was in good, plain, curt English: “Mother dying. Come at once.” CHAPTER XIII