She started when she saw Chick’s wide open eyes; then smiled, a motherly smile and compassionate.  She was dressed in a manner at once becoming and odd, to one unaccustomed, in a gown that draped the entire figure, yet left the right arm and shoulder bare.  Chick noticed that arm especially; it was white as marble, moulded full, and laced with fine blue veins.  He had never seen an arm like that.  Nor such a woman.  She might have been forty.

She came over to the bed and placed a hand on Chick’s forehead.  Again she smiled, and nodded.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

Now this is a strange thing; Watson could not account for it.  For, although she did not speak English, yet he could understand her quite well.  At the moment it seemed perfectly obvious; afterward, the fact became amazing.

He answered in the same way, his thoughts directing his lips.  And he found that as long as he made no conscious attempt to select the words for his thought, he could speak unhesitatingly.

“Where am I?”

She smiled indulgently, but did not answer.

“Is this the—­Blind Spot?”

“The Blind Spot!  I do not understand.”

“Who are you?”

“Your nurse.  Perhaps,” soothingly, “you would like to talk to the
Rhamda.”

“The Rhamda!”

“Yes.  The Rhamda Geos.”

XXX

THE PLUNGE

The woman left him.  For a while Chick reflected upon what she had said.  In full rush of returning vigour his mind was working clearly and with analytical exactness.

For the first time he noticed a heaviness in the air, overladen, pregnant.  He became aware of a strange, undercurrent of life; of an exceedingly faint, insistent sound, pulse-like and rhythmical, like the breathing undertones of multitudes.  He was a city man, and accustomed to the murmuring throbs of a metropolitan heart.  But this was very different.

Presently, amid the strangeness, he could distinguish the tinkle of elfin bells, almost imperceptible, but musical.  The whole air was laden with a subdued music, lined, as it were, with a golden vibrancy of tintinnabulary cadence—­distant, subdued, hardly more than a whisper, yet part of the air itself.

It gave him the feeling that he was in a dream.  In the realms of the subconscious he had heard just such sounds—­exotic and unearthly—­fleeting and evanescent.

The notion of dreams threw his mind into sudden alertness.  In an instant he was thinking systematically, and in the definite realisation of his plight.

The woman had spoken of “the Rhamda.”  True, she had added a qualifying “Geos,” but that did not matter.  Whether Geos or Avec, it was still the Rhamda.  By this time Watson was convinced that the word indicated some sort of title—­whether doctor, or lord, or professor, was not important.  What interested Chick was identity.  If he could solve that he could get at the crux of the Blind Spot.