It was dark when he awoke, and perhaps he was feverish or his brain was
weakened by illness, for it reproduced past scenes that were mysteriously
connected with the present. He was in a strange house in Santa Brigida,
for he remarked the shadowy creeper on the wall and a pool of moonlight
on the dark floor of his room. Yet the cornfields in an English valley,
through which he drove his motor bicycle, seemed more real, and he could
see the rows of stocked sheaves stretch back from the hedgerows he sped
past. Something sinister and threatening awaited him at the end of the
journey, but he could not tell what it was. Then the cornfields vanished
and he was crossing a quiet, walled garden with a girl at his side. He
remembered how the moonlight shone through the branches of a tree and
fell in silver, splashes on her white dress. Her face was in the shadow,
but he knew it well.
After a time he felt thirsty, and moving his head looked feebly about the
room. A slender, white figure sat near the wall, and he started, because
this must be the girl he had heard singing.
"I wonder if you could get me something to drink?" he said.
The girl rose and he watched her intently as she came towards him with a
glass. When she entered the moonlight his heart gave a sudden throb.
"Clare, Miss Kenwardine!" he said, and awkwardly raised himself on his
arm.
"Yes," she said, "I am Clare Kenwardine. But drink this; then I'll put
the pillows straight and you must keep still."
Dick drained the glass and lay down again, for he was weaker than he
thought.
"Thanks! Don't go back into the dark. You have been here all the time? I
mean, since I came."
"As you were seldom quite conscious until this morning, how did you
know?"
"I didn't know, in a way, and yet I did. There was somebody about who
made me think of England, and then, you see, I heard you sing."
"Still," she said, smiling, "I don't quite understand."
"Don't you?" said Dick, who felt he must make things plain. "Well, you
stole in and out and sat here sometimes when Lucille was tired. I didn't
exactly notice you--perhaps I was too ill--but I felt you were there, and
that was comforting."
"And yet you are surprised to see me now!"
"I can't have explained it properly. I didn't know you were Miss
Kenwardine; but I felt I knew you and kept trying to remember, but I was
feverish and my mind wouldn't take your image in. For all that, something
told me it was really there already, and I'd be able to recognize it if I
waited. It was like a photograph that wasn't developed."