"Perhaps you'd better, doctor—thanks," murmured Justin. He put his head in his hands and tried not to think of what was happening.
A minute or two passed. Then quick soft footsteps sounded and a pleasant voice said in utterly indefinable accents, "Ye mustn't feel so upset, Master Justin—we're all in the same boat."
The girl had heavy brown hair that fell in neat slow ripples well below her shoulders. Like himself she was barefoot and her figure looked enormous in a tentlike white nightgown that covered her from shoulder to ankle. She had fine healthy pink-and-white skin, made intriguing rather than marred by an occasional pockmark, and her eyes were as blue as the waters of Cohasset Bay.
Instinctively, despite a growing conviction that he was utterly mad, Justin scrambled to his feet. He said, "It does take a bit of getting used to—but perhaps you can help."
"That's why I'm here, Master Justin," she said. "Poor Dr. Phillips tells me ye too are from Boston. I must say I do not find ye'r countenance familiar."
Her accent, her phraseology—both were alien. As, come to think of it, was the nightgown she was wearing. Yet it was of a piece with his own pajamas and the dignified Dr. Phillips' lack of trousers. And those pockmarks—Justin studied them, then felt a surge of excitement. He said, "Pardon me for not knowing your name but—"
"Deborah Wilkins, spinster, of Prince Street," she cut in.
"—but," he went on, "would you mind telling me, Miss Wilkins, just when it was that you were brought here?"
"To Belvoir? Why, I retired to my bed on a February evening in seventeen sixty-one, to dream of the great white ship that would carry me far from prosaic Boston to some fine city overseas, instead of which the ship brought me here to Belvoir."
"I'll be damned!" said Justin, stunned not only by the date of Deborah's transfer to Belvoir but by the similarity of her experience to his own.