At that moment, however, the door opened, and turning quickly, I was confronted by an angular, bony-faced, lantern-jawed woman, whose rouged and powdered face and juvenility of dress struck me as utterly ludicrous. She was fifty, if a day, and although her face was wrinkled and brown where the artificial complexion had worn off, she was nevertheless attired in a manner becoming a girl of twenty.
“Oh, my dear Wilford! Whatever has happened?” she cried in alarm, in a thin, unmusical voice, when she beheld the bandages around my head.
I looked at her in mingled surprise and amusement; she was so doll-like and ridiculous in her painted juvenility.
“Mr Heaton accidentally struck his head against the statue in the drawing-room, madam,” explained Gedge. “Doctor Britten has assured me that the injury is not at all serious. A little rest is all that is necessary.”
“My dear Wilford! Oh, my dear Wilford! Why didn’t you call me at once?”
“Well, madam,” I answered, “that was scarcely possible, considering that I had not the honour of your acquaintance.”
“What!” she wailed. “You—you can’t really stand there and coolly tell me that you don’t know me?”
“I certainly assert, madam, that I have absolutely no knowledge whatever of whom you may be,” I said with some dignity.
“Is your brain so affected, then, that you actually fail to recognise me—Mary, your wife!”
“You!” I gasped, glaring at her, dumbfounded. “You, my wife! Impossible!”