Audrey stared at the doctor.
“Thank you,” said she, “I don’t want either a prescription or a sleeping draught. I’m quite well, quite sane. I can’t have been deceived. I saw the woman, I heard her speak, I saw and heard, not so well, but still I did see and hear him—a man who dragged her out of this room and into the next.”
The doctor looked puzzled, as well he might. He rose from the chair which he had taken in order to feel her pulse and inquire into her symptoms, and he walked across the room and peered into the empty fitting-room.
Then he looked at her again, and then at Mademoiselle Laure, who was standing motionless, with her arms folded, and her thin lips tightly pressed together, a few paces away from them.
Audrey looked at her too.
“If,” said Audrey, “Mademoiselle Laure would speak out, probably she could tell us something.”
The Frenchwoman, whether she understood this or not, looked as if she caught only her own name, and she at once said, in French, that she had felt sure Madame must be mistaken when she told her extraordinary story. The doctor bowed his head, but it was evident that his command of colloquial French was not equal to discussion of the matter in any language but his own.
There was a rather awkward pause, and then Audrey said impatiently that she supposed there was nothing more to be done, if Mademoiselle Laure would not speak.
“I shall consult my friends to-morrow, and take legal advice upon this, if necessary,” she said. “Dr.——”
“Fendall, my name is Fendall,” said he, supplying the name when she paused.