The rather secluded situation of my house has its reaction on the quality of my sleep. I don't mean that I don't ordinarily sleep perfectly soundly and naturally, but the routine of locking up for the night sets, as it were, a timepiece in my head. The running of the lake, the night-sounds of animals and birds, the creaking of a bough, the motion of a window-blind in the wind--these are every-night sounds to which I have grown accustomed; but any unusual sound will bring me wide awake in a moment. Robbery in the neighbourhood is not entirely unknown. I had slept for perhaps a couple of hours when I was thus brought suddenly awake. The moon was high over the plantation; it slanted whitely across my window-sash, cut into relief the folds of the casement curtains. Outside the night creatures would be at play or about their nocturnal employments. But it was no owl nor rabbit that I had heard. It had been the light crackling of something under a foot. I sat up, still, listening. I heard nothing further, and after a minute noiselessly uncovered myself and slipped out of bed. All the doors of my little suite stood open, so that I had no handle to turn as I tiptoed from my bedroom into the dressing-room. Thence I could look through the study to the balcony beyond. The night was palely brilliant; my eyes could penetrate into the detailed depths of the oaks across the pond; I could see the pebbles on the path, the shadow of a chimney-stack over the bathing-stage. The balcony itself, however, was a blackness. On that side of the house a marauder could easily hide. I went back to the dressing-room, took down a dark-coloured gown, put it on, and returned through the study. If anybody was lurking about I wished to be inconspicuous. I reached my writing-table and was about to step outside when again I heard the sound. It came, not from below, but from the balcony itself. My study doors are so arranged that I can either hook them half back, at an angle of forty-five, or entirely so, flush against the walls. That night they stood at their fullest width, so that, if anybody was on the verandah, I had not to risk discovering myself as it were obliquely. I advanced to the hinged edge and peered cautiously forth. Derry was not asleep. He was moving irresolutely, now a few steps this way, now a few steps that, at the farther end of the balcony, and the noise I had heard had been the cracking of a fir-cone or fragment of bark under his feet. His hair was tumbled, he had put on his old tweed jacket, but the pyjama-suit I had lent him was small for him, and his bare ankles showed above his heelless slippers. There was no light in his room, and I suddenly remembered that that evening he had not shown his usual anxiety to be off early upstairs. After those immensities of sleep, was he now suffering from insomnia?