WRECK ISLAND
Suddenly, with a smothered cry of surprise, Eleanor sat up. She seemed to have recovered full consciousness and sensibility with an instantaneous effect comparable only to that of electric light abruptly flooding a room at night. A moment ago she had been an insentient atom sunk deep in impenetrable night; now she was herself—and it was broad daylight.
With an abrupt, automatic movement, she left the bed and stood up, staring incredulously at the substance of what still wore in her memory the guise of a dream.
But it had been no dream, after all. She was actually in the small room with the low ceiling and the door (now shut) and the windows that revealed the green of leaves and the blue and gold of a sun-spangled sea. And her coat and hat and veil had been removed and were hanging from nails in the wall behind the door, and her clothing had been unfastened—precisely as she dimly remembered everything that had happened with relation to the strange woman.
She wore a little wrist-watch. It told her that the hour was after four in the afternoon.
She began hurriedly to dress, or rather to repair the disorder of her garments, all the while struggling between surprise that she felt rested and well and strong, and a haunting suspicion that she had been tricked.
Of the truth of this suspicion, confirmatory evidence presently overwhelmed her.
Since that draught of champagne before the roadside inn shortly after sunrise, she had known nothing clearly. It was impossible that she could without knowing it have accomplished her purpose with relation to Alison Landis and the Cadogan collar. She saw now, she knew now beyond dispute, that she had been drugged—not necessarily heavily; a simple dose of harmless bromides would have served the purpose in her overtaxed condition—and brought to this place in a semi-stupor, neither knowing whither she went nor able to object had she known.
The discovery of her handbag was all that was required to transmute fears and doubts into irrefragable knowledge.
No longer fastened to her wrist by the loop of its silken thong, she found the bag in plain sight on the top of a cheap pine bureau. With feverish haste she examined it. The necklace was gone.