"Yes," I agreed. Dora and I sat up and shifted reluctantly to give him room. The little figure ten feet away, stood impassive. I recall that I stared with a sudden startled astonishment; and then with a vague shudder stabbing into me. The silent shape was no more than five feet tall, so that with a quick glance here in the dimness one might have thought it a half grown boy. A man's long black overcoat fell from the top of its head almost to the ground, as though a boy had the overcoat hung on his head, with all of him shrouded inside it. But the top of the overcoat was limp, sagging. I had the sudden crazy thought that the thing was headless—an overcoat hanging on wide square shoulders without any head above them!
I shuddered involuntarily.
"You and the young lady like music?" the man beside me was saying. "It is romantic. You are engaged maybe? Or honeymooning?" His voice was almost too solicitous.
Between the shrouding fringe of his hat the colored tubelight sheen gleamed on his partly shrouded face. It was pallid, hawk-nosed, with burning dark eyes that still were staring with an almost rude intentness at Dora.
"No," I said. I moved with an impulse to stand up and take Dora to another bench, but the man's hand reached out and touched my arm.
"Just a minute," he said in his limping guttural voice. "My name is Bragg. What is yours?"
"Ralston," I said stiffly. "Thomas Ralston."
I could see that Dora now was staring at that little lurking figure. She, too, sensed that there was something gruesome about it.
The man beside me was speaking more swiftly now in a low furtive flow of mumbled words. "I can interest young lovers like you. I have a place, just for honey-mooners. A little colony of lovers. A place to live, without cost, and no work. You would like it. A very beautiful place."
"We're not married," I said. Was this weird fellow a solicitor for some rich man's altruistic colony? I had heard of such places. In my father's day there was a big one on an island off the Florida coast, and another in the South Seas—colonies where newlyweds went to create an earthly paradise, which, of course, wouldn't work out.