His mind would persist in making a mystery of the mirror-walled room with its five dazzling occupants, and even the bumpings of the imitation camel could not jerk out of his head speculations which played around the dryad door.  He was as curious as Fatima herself, and with somewhat the same curiosity; for, except that in one case the beautiful ladies had their heads, and in the other had lost them, there was a hint of resemblance between the two mysteries.

Peter Rolls wondered whether he would like to ask his sister Ena if she knew the visions, or even if, being a woman, she could form any theory to account for them.  It would be interesting to see what she would say; but then, unless she were too seasick, she would probably laugh, and perhaps tell Lord Raygan.

As for the visions themselves, only one had spirit enough left in her to be able to laugh at being thought a dryad or a mystery.  She alone of the five would have known what “dryad” means.  And she could always laugh, no matter how miserable or how sick she was.

That day she was very sick indeed.  They were all very sick, but she could not help seeing, at her worst, that it was funny.

“For heaven’s sake, what are you giggling at?” snapped the longest, slimmest, most abnormal dryad, diaphanously draped in yellow, when she could gasp out an intelligible sentence after an exhausting bout of agony.

“Us,” said the girl who could always laugh, a vision in silver.

“Us?  I don’t see anything funny about us!” groaned a tall dream in crimson and purple.

“Funny!  I should think not!” snorted a fantasy in emerald.

“It makes me worse to hear you laugh,” squealed a radiance in rose.

“I wish we were all dead, especially Miss Child,” snarled the last of the five, a symphony in black and all conceivable shades of blue.  Because of this combination, the Miss Child in question had named her the “Bruise.”

“Sorry!  I’ll try not to laugh again till the sea goes down,” Miss Child apologized.  “I wasn’t laughing at any of you exactly, it was more the whole situation:  us, dressed like stars of the Russian ballet and sick as dogs, pearls in our hair and basins in our hands, looking like queens and feeling like dolls with our stuffing gone.”

“Don’t speak of stuffing.  It makes me think of sage and onions,” quavered the tallest queen.

“Ugh!” they all groaned, except Winifred Child, who was to blame for starting the subject.  “Ugh!  Oh!  Ugh!”

When they were better they lay back on their sofas, or leaned back in their chairs, their beautiful—­or meant to be beautiful—­faces pale, their eyes shut.  And it was at this moment that Peter Rolls burst open the door.

As he had observed, the waxlike figures moved, sat upright, and stared.  This sudden disturbance of brain balance made them all giddy, but the surprise of seeing a man, not a steward, at the door, was so great that for a moment or two it acted as a tonic.  Nothing dreadful happened to any one of the five until after the smooth black head had been withdrawn and the door closed.