“Hadn’t I another nurse?” Dick asked.
Jake laughed. “I ought to have remembered that you’re not musical. There was a nursing sister of some religious order.”
“I don’t mean a nun,” Dick persisted. “A girl came in now and then.”
“It’s quite possible. Some of them are sympathetic and some are curious. No doubt, you were an interesting patient; anyhow, you gave the Spanish doctor plenty trouble. He was rather anxious for a time; the fever you had before the dago stabbed you complicated things.” Jake paused and looked at his watch. “Now I’ve got to quit. I had orders not to stay long, but I’ll come back soon to see how you’re getting on.”
Dick let him go and lay still, thinking drowsily. Jake had apparently not meant to answer his questions. He wanted to know where he was and had not been told. It looked as if his comrade had been warned not to enlighten him; but there was no reason for this. Above all, he wanted to know who was the girl with the sweet voice and light step. Jake, who had admitted that she might have been in his room, had, no doubt, seen her, and Dick could not understand why he should refuse to speak of her. While he puzzled about it he went to sleep again.
It was dark when he awoke, and perhaps he was feverish or his brain was weakened by illness, for it reproduced past scenes that were mysteriously connected with the present. He was in a strange house in Santa Brigida, for he remarked the shadowy creeper on the wall and a pool of moonlight on the dark floor of his room. Yet the cornfields in an English valley, through which he drove his motor bicycle, seemed more real, and he could see the rows of stocked sheaves stretch back from the hedgerows he sped past. Something sinister and threatening awaited him at the end of the journey, but he could not tell what it was. Then the cornfields vanished and he was crossing a quiet, walled garden with a girl at his side. He remembered how the moonlight shone through the branches of a tree and fell in silver, splashes on her white dress. Her face was in the shadow, but he knew it well.
After a time he felt thirsty, and moving his head looked feebly about the room. A slender, white figure sat near the wall, and he started, because this must be the girl he had heard singing.
“I wonder if you could get me something to drink?” he said.
The girl rose and he watched her intently as she came towards him with a glass. When she entered the moonlight his heart gave a sudden throb.
“Clare, Miss Kenwardine!” he said, and awkwardly raised himself on his arm.