people. You transmute the commonest traits into gold of your own;
but after all there are no new names. You are amiable. You were most
amiable to me when I first saw you."

"Really. I was not aware. Not specially . . . "

"I had never the presumption to think that it was special. Moreover, my
head was in a whirl. I was lost in astonishment first of all at what I
had been listening to all night. Your history, you know, a wonderful
tale with a flavour of wine in it and wreathed in clouds, with that
amazing decapitated, mutilated dummy of a woman lurking in a corner, and
with Blunt's smile gleaming through a fog, the fog in my eyes, from
Mills' pipe, you know. I was feeling quite inanimate as to body and
frightfully stimulated as to mind all the time. I had never heard
anything like that talk about you before. Of course I wasn't sleepy, but
still I am not used to do altogether without sleep like Blunt . . ."

"Kept awake all night listening to my story!" She marvelled.

"Yes. You don't think I am complaining, do you? I wouldn't have missed
it for the world. Blunt in a ragged old jacket and a white tie and that
incisive polite voice of his seemed strange and weird. It seemed as
though he were inventing it all rather angrily. I had doubts as to your
existence."

"Mr. Blunt is very much interested in my story."

"Anybody would be," I said. "I was. I didn't sleep a wink. I was
expecting to see you soon--and even then I had my doubts."

"As to my existence?"

"It wasn't exactly that, though of course I couldn't tell that you
weren't a product of Captain Blunt's sleeplessness. He seemed to dread
exceedingly to be left alone and your story might have been a device to
detain us . . ."

"He hasn't enough imagination for that," she said.

"It didn't occur to me. But there was Mills, who apparently believed in
your existence. I could trust Mills. My doubts were about the
propriety. I couldn't see any good reason for being taken to see you.
Strange that it should be my connection with the sea which brought me
here to the Villa."

"Unexpected perhaps."

"No. I mean particularly strange and significant."

"Why?"

"Because my friends are in the habit of telling me (and each other) that
the sea is my only love. They were always chaffing me because they
couldn't see or guess in my life at any woman, open or secret. . ."

"And is that really so?" she inquired negligently.

"Why, yes. I don't m