Then he walked quietly down the corridor to the Grey Room.On reaching it his usual good temper returned, and he found himself entirely happy and contented.He unlocked the forbidden entrance, set his candle by the bed, and locked the door again from inside.He rolled up his dressing-gown for a pillow, and placed his watch and revolver and candle at his hand on a chair.A few broken reflections drifted through his mind, as he yawned and prepared to sleep.His brain brought up events of the day - a missed shot, a good shot, lunch under a haystack with Mary and Fayre-Michell's niece.She was smart and slowy and slangy - cheap every way compared with Mary.What would his wife think if she knew he was so near? Come to him for certain.He cordially hoped that he might not be recalled to his ship; but there was a possibility of it.It would be rather a lark to show the governor over the Indomitable.She was a "hush-hush" ship - one of the wonders of the Navy still.Funny that the Italian roof of the Grey Room looked like a dome, thought it was really flat.A cunning trick of perspective.
It was a still and silent night, moonless, very dark, and very tranquil.He went to the window to throw it open.
Only a solitary being waked long that night at Chadlands, and only a solitary mind suffered tribulation.But into the small hours Henry Lennox endured the companionship of disquiet thoughts.He could not sleep, and his brain, clear enough, retraced no passage from the past day.Indeed the events of the day had sunk into remote time.He was only concerned with the present, and he wondered while he worried that he should be worrying.Yet a proleptic instinct made him look forward.He had neither lied nor exaggerated to May.From the moment of losing the toss, he honestly experienced a strong, subjective impression of danger arising out of the proposed attack on the mysteries of the Grey Room.It was, indeed, that consciousness of greater possibilities in the adventure than May admitted or imagined which made Lennox so insistent.Looking back, he perceived many things, and chiefly that he had taken a wrong line, and approached Mary's husband from a fatal angle.Too late herecognized his error.It was inevitable that a hint of suspected danger would confirm the sailor in his resolution; and that such a hint should follow the spin of the coin against Lennox, and be accompanied by the assurance that, had he won, Henry would have proceeded, despite his intuitions, to do what he now begged Tom not to do - that was a piece of clumsy work which he deeply regretted.
