"You saw her?" I demanded. "You call her young. You saw her face, then?"
"I could forget it if I had," he said dryly. "As it happened, I didn't. She was wrapped in a lot of floating thin stuff; gray, I guess? The room was pretty dark, and I was jumping out of sleep. I don't know why she seemed young unless it was the easy, light way she moved. By the time I got what she was saying and sat up, she was gone."
"Gone?"
"She went out the door like a puff of smoke. I just saw a gray figure in the doorway, where the hall lamp made it brighter than in the room. When I came into the hall there wasn't a sign of anybody about. Nor afterward, either!"
I considered briefly.
"I suppose I know what you are thinking, Vere. It is natural, but wrong. The lady——"
"Mr. Locke," he checked me, "I'm not—thinking. I guess you're as good a judge as I am about what goes on in this house. After the way you've treated us from the first, I'd be pretty dull not to know you're as choice of Phillida as I am; and she is all that matters."
"Who is?" demanded Phillida, returning. "Me? I haven't the least idea what you are talking about, Drawls, but I think Cousin Roger matters a great deal more than I do, just now. Perhaps now he is able to tell us about this attack, and if he should have a doctor. I have noticed for weeks how thin and grave he has been growing to be. If only he would drink buttermilk!"
I looked into the candid, affectionate face she turned to me. From her, I looked to her husband, whose New England steadiness had been tempered by a sailor's service in the war and broadened by the test of his experience in a city cabaret. A new thought cleaved through my perplexities like an arrow shot from a far-off place.
"How much do you both trust me?" I slowly asked. "I do not mean trust my character or my good intentions, but how much confidence have you in my sanity and commonsense? Would you believe a thing because I told it to you? Or would you say: 'This is outside usual experience. He is deceiving us, or mad'?"