"Yes, she's tall," I admitted.
"Everything else all right?" queried the voice. The wires were working better now. "I don't need to ask if she's having a good time," essayed the voice very courteously. "She's always so essentially original in her ways of having a good time—even with strangers—even when she's really feeling rather shy."
"Oh, she's having a good time, all right," I hastened to assure him. "Three perfectly eligible young men all competing for her favor!"
"Only three?" laughed the voice. "You surprise me!"
"And speaking of originality," I rallied instantly to that laugh, "she has invented the most diverting game! She is playing at being-engaged-to-a-different-man—every day of her visit. Oh very circumspectly, you understand," I hastened to affirm. "Nothing serious at all!"
"No, I certainly hope not," mumbled the voice again through some maddeningly soggy connection. "Because, you see, I'm rather expecting to marry her myself on the fifteenth of September next."
CHAPTER IV
SLEEP is a funny thing! Really comical I mean! A magician's trick! "Now you have it—and now you don't!"
Certainly I had very little of it the night of Dr. Brawne's telephone conversation. I was too surprised.
Yet staring up through those long wakeful hours into the jetty black heights of my bedroom ceiling it didn't seem to be so much the conversation itself as the perfectly irrelevant events succeeding that conversation that kept hurtling back so into my visual consciousness—The blueness of the May Girl's eyes! The brightness of her hair!— Rollins's necktie! The perfectly wanton hideousness of Rollins's necktie!—The bang—bang—bang of a storm- tortured shutter way off in the ell somewhere.