“You’re alone here?”
“Quite, for the present.”
“Then perhaps you might care to come and stay a night or two at my house, until you’re entirely….” She mumbled, made a gesture that implied the missing word and went on. “I have a house over there.” She waved her hand in the direction of the mountainous section of the Shelleian landscape.
Gleefully, in my tipsy mood, I accepted her invitation. “Too delightful,” I said. Everything, this morning, was too delightful. I should have accepted with genuine, unmixed pleasure an invitation to stay with Miss Carruthers or Mr. Brimstone.
“And your name?” she asked. “I don’t know that yet.”
“Chelifer.”
“Chelifer? Not Francis Chelifer?”
“Francis Chelifer,” I affirmed.
“Francis Chelifer!” Positively, her soul was in my name. “But how wonderful! I’ve wanted to meet you for years.”
For the first time since I had risen intoxicated from the dead I had an awful premonition of to-morrow’s sobriety. I remembered for the first time that round the corner, only just round the corner, lay the real world.