only to check himself in the act as often as he started, he lost
consciousness in uneasy dreams rather than fell asleep.

He was smothering, and yet could not open his lips to gasp for a breath
of air. Then he was drowning: he gulped in vast sheets of water upon his
lungs. An alarm sounded from Eva's barricade. He heard the pans and
kettles clanging and her own voice in screams which pierced him, yet he
could not move. A nightmare of heat enveloped him; the smothering
element pouring upon his lungs was not water, but smoke; and he knew if
no effort of will could move his body to her rescue he must be perishing
himself.

After these brief sensations his existence was as blank as the empty
void outside the worlds, until his ears began to throb like drums, and
he felt water, like the tears he had shed in the morning, running all
over his face. Eva held him in her arms, and alternately kissed his head
and drenched it from the lake.

Moreover, he was in the boat, outside the bay, and their island glowed
like a furnace before his dazzled eyes.

Those pine woods where he had gone to sleep were roaring up toward
heaven in a column of fire. The tent was burning, all its interior
illuminated until every object showed its minutest lines. He thought he
saw some of Eva's dark hairs in an upturned hair-brush on the
wash-stand.

Fire ran along the cliff-edge and dropped hissing brands into the lake.
Old moss logs and pine-trees dry as tinder sent out sickening heat. The
light ran like a flash up the tree over their stove, and in an instant