“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday? I daresay. But I didn’t sleep last night. It wouldn’t let me.”
“Very few people do sleep,” said Agatha, “for the first time in a strange place.”
“The place isn’t strange. That’s what I complain of. That’s what keeps me awake. No place ever will be strange when It’s there. And it was there last night.”
“No place ever will be strange when It’s there.”
“Darling—” Milly murmured.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “The Thing that keeps me awake. Of course if I’d slept last night I’d have known it wasn’t there. But when I didn’t sleep—”
He left it to them to draw the only possible conclusion.
They dropped the subject. They turned to other things and talked a little while, sitting with him in his room with the drawn blinds. From time to time when they appealed to him he gave an urbane assent, a murmur, a suave motion of his hand. When the light went they lit a lamp. Agatha stayed and dined with them, that being the best thing she could do.