I heard no more, for Miss Apperthwaite, her face flushed and her eyes shining, beckoned me imperiously to follow her, and departed so hurriedly that it might be said she ran.
“I don't know,” said I, keeping at her elbow, “whether it's more like Alice or the interlocutor's conversation at a minstrel show.”
“Hush!” she warned me, though we were already at a safe distance, and did not speak again until we had reached the front walk. There she paused, and I noted that she was trembling—and, no doubt correctly, judged her emotion to be that of consternation.
“There was no one THERE!” she exclaimed. “He was all by himself! It was just the same as what you saw last night!”
“Evidently.”
“Did it sound to you”—there was a little awed tremor in her voice that I found very appealing—“did it sound to you like a person who'd lost his MIND?”
“I don't know,” I said. “I don't know at all what to make of it.”
“He couldn't have been”—her eyes grew very wide—“intoxicated!”
“No. I'm sure it wasn't that.”
“Then I don't know what to make of it, either. All that wild talk about 'Bill Hammersley' and 'Simpledoria' and spring-boards in Scotland and—”