“Fiancé! How do you know he is her fiancé? You have only his word for it.”
“It did not occur to me to ask for the lady’s,” said the doctor drily.
“Well, but the room, the lamps and the spears and the tapestries! Her dress too! Do you have many patients dressed like that?”
Dr. Bannerman looked at him again. If he had seen nothing to surprise him in his patient, he saw much in his questioner.
“Her dress? Let me see; she had on a white muslin wrapper with one sleeve burnt off. No, I saw nothing astonishing in that. Her governess, a rigidly dignified Englishwoman, was with her.”
“And the furniture of the room——”
“Was the usual furniture of a back bedroom in the better class of London apartments.”
“Oh.” A pause. Lauriston looked half relieved, half puzzled.
He did not want to think that the little section of an enchanted palace, in which he had passed through such a brief but exciting experience of something altogether new and intoxicating in life, was the mere vision that his calmer reason began already to tell him it must be.
“You didn’t go into the front room then?”