Lanyard, however, never went to bed without first securing his door so that
it might be opened by force alone; and never slept without a pistol beneath
his pillow.

But the truth is, he slept little. For the first time in his history he
learned what it meant to will sleep to come and have his will defied. He
lay for hours staring wide-eyed into darkness, hearkening to the steady
throbbing of the engines, unable to dismiss the thought that their every
revolution brought him so much nearer to America, so much the nearer to
his hour with Ekstrom. In vain he sought to fatigue his senses by
over-indulgence in his weakness for gambling. Day-long sessions at poker
and auction in the smoking room--where he found formidable antagonists,
principally in the persons of Crane, Bartlett Putnam, Velasco, Bartholomew,
Julius Becker and Baron von Harden--served only to forward his financial
fortunes; his luck was phenomenal; he multiplied many times that slender
store of English banknotes with which he had embarked upon this adventure.
But he left each exhausting sitting only to toss upon a wakeful pillow or
to roam uneasily the dark and desolate decks, a man haunted by ghosts of
his own raising, hagridden by passions of his own nurturing....

About two o'clock on the third night (the first outside the danger zone,
when every other passenger might reasonably be expected to be in his berth)
Lanyard lay in a deck-chair deep in shadows, wondering if it was worthwhile
to go below and woo sleep in his stateroom. By way of experiment he shut
his eyes. When after a moment he opened them again he was no longer alone.

Some distance away, at the rail, the woman of Stateroom 27 was standing
with her back to Lanyard, looking intently forward, unquestionably ignorant
of his presence.