struck him as incongruous and impossible that only fifteen hours had passed since then.  If he possessed a doubt of the reality of it all, the bed was there to help convince him.  It was a real bed, and he had not slept in a real bed for a number of years.  Wallie had made it ready for him.  Its sheets were snow-white.  There was a counterpane with a fringe on it and pillows puffed up with billowy invitation, as if they were on the point of floating away.  Had they risen before his eyes, Keith would have regarded the phenomenon rather casually.  After the swift piling up of the amazing events of those fifteen hours, a floating pillow would have seemed quite in the natural orbit of things.  But they did not float.  They remained where they were, their white breasts bared to him, urging upon him a common-sense perspective of the situation.  He wasn’t going to run away.  He couldn’t sit up all night.  Therefore why not come to them and sleep?

There was something directly personal in the appeal of the pillows and the bed.  It was not general; it was for him.  And Keith responded.

He made another note of the time, a half-hour after one, when he turned in.  He allotted himself four hours of sleep, for it was his intention to be up with the sun.

XII

Necessity had made of Keith a fairly accurate human chronometer.  In the second year of his fugitivism he had lost his watch.  At first it was like losing an arm, a part of his brain, a living friend.  From that time until he came into possession of Conniston’s timepiece he was his own hour-glass and his own alarm clock.  He became proficient.

Brady’s bed and the Circe-breasted pillows that supported his head were his undoing.  The morning after Shan Tung’s visit he awoke to find the sun flooding in through the eastern window of his room, The warmth of it as it fell full in his face, setting his eyes blinking, told him it was too late.  He guessed it was eight o’clock.  When he fumbled his watch out from under his pillow and looked at it, he found it was a quarter past.  He got up quietly, his mind swiftly aligning itself to the happenings of yesterday.  He stretched himself until his muscles snapped, and his chest expanded with deep breaths of air from the windows he had left open when he went to bed.  He was fit.  He was ready for Shan Tung, for McDowell.  And over this physical readiness there surged the thrill of a glorious anticipation.  It fairly staggered him to discover how badly he wanted to see Mary Josephine again.

He wondered if she was still asleep and answered that there was little possibility of her being awake—­even at eight o’clock.  Probably she would sleep until noon, the poor, tired, little thing!  He smiled affectionately into the mirror over Brady’s dressing-table.  And then the unmistakable sound of voices in the outer room took him curiously to the door.  They were subdued voices.  He listened hard, and his heart pumped faster.  One of them was Wallie’s voice; the other was Mary Josephine’s.