“I had never the presumption to think that it was special. Moreover, my head was in a whirl. I was lost in astonishment first of all at what I had been listening to all night. Your history, you know, a wonderful tale with a flavour of wine in it and wreathed in clouds, with that amazing decapitated, mutilated dummy of a woman lurking in a corner, and with Blunt’s smile gleaming through a fog, the fog in my eyes, from Mills’ pipe, you know. I was feeling quite inanimate as to body and frightfully stimulated as to mind all the time. I had never heard anything like that talk about you before. Of course I wasn’t sleepy, but still I am not used to do altogether without sleep like Blunt . . .”
“Kept awake all night listening to my story!” She marvelled.
“Yes. You don’t think I am complaining, do you? I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Blunt in a ragged old jacket and a white tie and that incisive polite voice of his seemed strange and weird. It seemed as though he were inventing it all rather angrily. I had doubts as to your existence.”
“Mr. Blunt is very much interested in my story.”
“Anybody would be,” I said. “I was. I didn’t sleep a wink. I was expecting to see you soon—and even then I had my doubts.”
“As to my existence?”
“It wasn’t exactly that, though of course I couldn’t tell that you weren’t a product of Captain Blunt’s sleeplessness. He seemed to dread exceedingly to be left alone and your story might have been a device to detain us . . .”
“He hasn’t enough imagination for that,” she said.
“It didn’t occur to me. But there was Mills, who apparently believed in your existence. I could trust Mills. My doubts were about the propriety. I couldn’t see any good reason for being taken to see you. Strange that it should be my connection with the sea which brought me here to the Villa.”
“Unexpected perhaps.”