"Mean to say, you'll find it's somethin' much more simple and elementary with you. You've had a bad fall and a rap on the head that recalls a similar mishap several months old, and for the time being everythin' that happened in between seems to have been wiped out. But I'll go bail it will all come back to you inside of twenty-four hours."
"Why twenty-four hours?"
"As soon as you've had a sound sleep, that is—same thing. Let me send you in a powder, and by dinner time you'll be ready to apologize for tryin' to take advantage of my innocent and trustin' nature. What do you say?"
Lanyard said that monsieur was too kind . . . "But a favour, my dear doctor," he added with a tolerably crest-fallen air. "We won't find it necessary to tell our fellow passengers what a sorry fraud I am, will we?"
"Oh! I won't be the one to expose you," Bright replied with vast pleasure in his ambiguity. "And you won't have a chance to tell on yourself before the sea goes down a bit. Meanin' to say, madam la comtesse is a poor sailor. But, you see, your anxiety not to be made a laughin' stock to her proves that your memory is improvin' every minute."
"One wastes time trying to deceive you," Lanyard admitted with humility. "But there is one thing, I believe, that might aid my recovery: a look at the passenger-list. Do you think you could by any chance find a copy for me?"
Contentment with his great cunning sustained this shock with poor grace: the surgeon frowned a frown of impatience mixed with mystification. Was it possible this chap still imagined he had found an easy dupe? However, one had to be diplomatic . . .
"Oh! very well," the surgeon said shortly. "I'll have the steward bring you one with your sleeping powder. Though I must admit I don't quite see . . ."
Lanyard forgot to offer any explanation; and when the passenger-list had duly been delivered and scrutinized was obliged to confess that he had exerted himself to no purpose. "Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes" was much too transparent an incognita for Liane Delorme; and the discovery that she was a fellow passenger had been excuse enough for the surmise that others of their common acquaintance might be keeping them company en voyage. But if such were the case, the printed list gave no clue, no other name that figured in it proved in the least degree stimulating, none suggested a likely alias for Morphew, or Pagan, or Mallison, or . . . Mrs. Folliott McFee . . .
Neither did anything reward his eager search for a name whose music was like an old song singing in one's heart.