That evening he was unusually merry.  Mr. and Mrs. Allen and Helen and myself went in to wish him good night.  He was loath to let us leave, but was reminded that he would sail in the morning, and that the doctor had insisted that he must be quiet and lie still in bed and rest.  He was never one to be very obedient.  A little later Mrs. Allen and I, in the sitting-room, heard some one walking softly outside on the veranda.  We went out there, and he was marching up and down in his dressing-gown as unconcerned as if he were not an invalid at all.  He hadn’t felt sleepy, he said, and thought a little exercise would do him good.  Perhaps it did, for he slept soundly that night—­a great blessing.

Mr. Allen had chartered a special tug to come to Bay House landing in the morning and take him to the ship.  He was carried in a little hand-chair to the tug, and all the way out he seemed light-spirited, anything but an invalid:  The sailors carried him again in the chair to his state-room, and he bade those dear Bermuda friends good-by, and we sailed away.

As long as I remember anything I shall remember the forty-eight hours of that homeward voyage.  It was a brief two days as time is measured; but as time is lived it has taken its place among those unmeasured periods by the side of which even years do not count.

At first he seemed quite his natural self, and asked for a catalogue of the ship’s library, and selected some memoirs of the Countess of Cardigan for his reading.  He asked also for the second volume of Carlyle’s French Revolution, which he had with him.  But we ran immediately into the more humid, more oppressive air of the Gulf Stream, and his breathing became at first difficult, then next to impossible.  There were two large port-holes, which I opened; but presently he suggested that it would be better outside.  It was only a step to the main-deck, and no passengers were there.  I had a steamer-chair brought, and with Claude supported him to it and bundled him with rugs; but it had grown damp and chilly, and his breathing did not improve.  It seemed to me that the end might come at any moment, and this thought was in his mind, too, for once in the effort for breath he managed to say: 

“I am going—­I shall be gone in a moment.”

Breath came; but I realized then that even his cabin was better than this.  I steadied him back to his berth and shut out most of that deadly dampness.  He asked for the “hypnotic ’injunction” (for his humor never left him), and though it was not yet the hour prescribed I could not deny it.  It was impossible for him to lie down, even to recline, without great distress.  The opiate made him drowsy, and he longed for the relief of sleep; but when it seemed about to possess him the struggle for air would bring him upright.