Ah Sing kept watch for the rest of that night, but there was hardly need--I remained vividly awake myself every minute of the time. In the morning I rose so utterly limp that Philipson diagnosed fever from the mosquitoes--which had bitten us both pretty voraciously--and dosed me with a quinine mixture into which I suspect he had dropped some pleasant opiate. At any rate, it wiped the restlessness out of me as if with a sponge, and I slept sound till lunch. But if I was below par, Philipson himself seemed at the very pitch of his form, alert, vigorous, in the best of spirits. He busied himself at the table with maps and calculations and expense-sheets, and from an occasional remark he rapped out to me I knew he was in a downright itch for the hour of Poyning's return. The one thing that seemed equal to allaying his impatience during that day of forced delay was wine. Saunders Philipson consumed, I believe, seven bottles between breakfast and dinner time, and the proprietress was already predicting the exhaustion of her modest cellar. Neither Philipson nor I alluded once to the episode of last night, yet I fancy it was in the thoughts of both of us. From time to time throughout the day he would shoot sudden glances towards the balcony, as if the affair had occurred to his mind; and I couldn't help connecting his overpowering excitement of to-day with what had happened in the night watches. For my part, I could think of little else. That two strangers should have gained access to the verandah without our hearing them approach was hardly less a matter for surprise than alarm. An active man might, it's true, have shinned up the wooden pillars and drawn his accomplice after him with a cord, yet even this supposition seemed wild enough to me when I remembered that one of the intruders was a woman. Or at least, I could have sworn at the time that it was a woman. Could it be the whole thing was an illusion--that I was half asleep when I looked out, and that my dreaming eyes had turned some short-coated Chinaman into Saunders Philipson and his taller accomplice into that mysterious lady of the long robe? If so, it was an astounding coincidence that both Ah Sing and myself should fall into the same remarkable error. Then again, who were these prowlers of the night? It wasn't like the enemies we had known--to be scared off by the mere sound of our voices, yet that alone is what could have happened. While we were talking at Philipson's door, they must have taken fright and escaped down the balcony pillars and right round the hotel by way of the water's edge. This might even have been done with the connivance of those inside, and there recurred rather significantly to my mind Philipson's remark that the proprietress of the inn would want watching.