He started off with a brave, staggering rush that carried him a dozen feet inland. Then his knees turned to water, and the blackness of night shut down upon his senses.
XV
DISCLOSURES
Sleep is a potent medicine for the mind; but sometimes the potion is compounded with somewhat too heavy a proportion of dreams and nonsense; when it's apt to play curious tricks with returning consciousness. When Whitaker awoke he was on the sands of Narragansett, and the afternoon was cloudy-warm and bright, so that his eyes were grateful for the shade of a white parasol that a girl he knew was holding over him; and his age was eighteen and his cares they were none; and the girl was saying in a lazy, laughing voice: "I love my love with a P because he's Perfectly Pulchritudinous and Possesses the Power of Pleasing, and because he Prattles Prettily and his socks are Peculiarly Purple—"
"And," the man who'd regained his youth put in, "his name is Peter and he's Positively a Pest...."
But the voice in which he said this was quite out of the picture—less a voice than a croak out of a throat kiln-dry and burning. So he grew suspicious of his senses; and when the parasol was transformed into the shape of a woman wearing a clumsy jacket of soiled covert-cloth over a non-descript garment of weirdly printed calico—then he was sure that something was wrong with him.
Besides, the woman who wasn't a parasol suddenly turned and bent over him an anxious face, exclaiming in accents of consternation: "O dear! If he's delirious—!"
His voice, when he strove to answer, rustled and rattled rather than enunciated, surprising him so that he barely managed to say: "What nonsense! I'm just thirsty!" Then the circuit of returning consciousness closed and his lost youth slipped forever from his grasp.
"I thought you would be," said the woman, calmly; "so I brought water. Here...."