“But Anna would not hear of it. There was not another house within miles. She insisted on her stopping the night. A room was got ready, and presently we all three sat down to a nondescript meal which poor Anna believed to be dinner.
“I was attracted by our guest, but not more than I had often been before by other women. She had great beauty, but I had seen many beautiful women during the last twenty years. She was gay, and I like gaiety. And she had the look of alertness and perfect health which often accompanies a happy temperament. She and Anna talked incessantly, at least, Anna did. I did not join in much. My cure had left me languid. When we had finished our meal we found the rain had ceased, and the moon shone high in heaven over a world of mist. The moors were gone. The billows of mist drifted slowly past us like noiseless waves upon a great sea. The house and terraced garden rose above it like a solitary island. The night was hot and airless, and we sat out on the verandah, and talked of many things.
“Of course, Anna is eccentric. There is no doubt about it. But the worst of her is that her form of eccentricity is infectious. She is extremely impulsive and confidential, and others follow suit if they are with her. I have known her once (at a luncheon party of eight people whom she had never met before) say, as a matter of course, that she remembered a previous existence, and sleeping seven in a bed in an underground cellar. I was horrified, but no one else was. And a grave man beside her, a minister, told her that when first he went to Madeira he remembered living there in a little Portuguese cottage with a row of sugar canes in front of it. He said he recognised the cottage the moment he saw it, and said to himself, ‘At any rate, I am happier now than I was then.’ A sort of barrier seemed always to go down in Anna’s presence. People momentarily lost their fear of each other, and said things which I have no doubt they regretted afterwards.
“I need hardly say that as Anna looked at the moonlight and the mist she became recklessly indiscreet. I could not stop her. I did not try. I shut my eyes, and pretended to be asleep. And she actually told this entire stranger all about her first meeting with her late husband, which it seemed had taken place on an expedition to Nepal. Anna was always wandering over the globe with Lamas, or sailing on inflated pigskins with wild Indians, or things of that kind. I had only known the bare fact of her marriage with a distinguished but impecunious soldier who had died some years later, and I was amazed what a dramatic story she made of her first encounter with him on the mountains of Nepal, and how his coolies had all run away, and she let him join on to her party. And how they walked together for three days through a land of rose-coloured rhododendrons; without even knowing each other’s name, and how she cooked their meals at the doors of the little mud rest-houses. There was something very lovable after all in the way Anna told it. I realised for the first time that she, too, had lived, that she had been touched by the sacred flame, and that it was natural to her to speak of her great happiness, the memory of which dwelt continually with her.
“I saw through my half-closed eyes the strange woman’s hand laid for a moment on Anna’s hand.
“‘You were very fortunate,’ she said gently.
“‘Was I?’ said Anna. ‘I suppose everyone else is the same. We all see that light once in our lives, don’t we? I am sure you have too.’
“‘I am unmarried,’ said the stranger, ‘and thirty years of age, and nothing of that kind has ever happened to me. I was once engaged to be married for a short time. But I had to break it off. It was no good. I suppose,’ she said, with a low laugh, ‘that the reason we are both talking so frankly is because we are entire strangers to each other.’
“‘I do believe the world would go all right, and that we should all be happy if only we did not know each other,’ said Anna earnestly.
“I felt sure the stranger would think her mad, but she answered tranquilly: