’Quite sure.  Do you think I could mistake them,—­especially after what has happened since?  I hear them singing in my ears,—­they haunt me all the time.’

She put her hands up to her face, as if to veil something from her eyes.  I was becoming more and more convinced that there was something about the Apostle’s connection with his Oriental friend which needed probing to the bottom.

‘What sort of a man is he to look at, this patient of yours?’

I had my doubts as to the gentleman’s identity,—­which her words dissolved; only, however, to increase my mystification in another direction.

’He seems to be between thirty and forty.  He has light hair, and straggling sandy whiskers.  He is so thin as to be nothing but skin and bone,—­the doctor says it’s a case of starvation.’

’You say he has light hair, and sandy whiskers.  Are you sure the whiskers are real?’

She opened her eyes.

‘Of course they’re real.  Why shouldn’t they be real?’

‘Does he strike you as being a—­foreigner?’

’Certainly not.  He looks like an Englishman, and he speaks like one, and not, I should say, of the lowest class.  It is true that there is a very curious, a weird, quality in his voice, what I have heard of it, but it is not un-English.  If it is catalepsy he is suffering from, then it is a kind of catalepsy I never heard of.  Have you ever seen a clairvoyant?’ I nodded.  ’He seems to me to be in a state of clairvoyance.  Of course the doctor laughed when I told him so, but we know what doctors are, and I still believe that he is in some condition of the kind.  When he said that last night he struck me as being under what those sort of people call ‘influence,’ and that whoever had him under influence was forcing him to speak against his will, for the words came from his lips as if they had been wrung from him in agony.’

Knowing what I did know, that struck me as being rather a remarkable conclusion for her to have reached, by the exercise of her own unaided powers of intuition,—­but I did not choose to let her know I thought so.

’My dear Marjorie!—­you who pride yourself on having your imagination so strictly under control!—­on suffering it to take no errant flights!’

’Is not the fact that I do so pride myself proof that I am not likely to make assertions wildly,—­proof, at any rate, to you?  Listen to me.  When I left that unfortunate creature’s room,—­I had had a nurse sent for, I left him in her charge—­and reached my own bedroom, I was possessed by a profound conviction that some appalling, intangible, but very real danger, was at that moment threatening Paul.’

’Remember,—­you had had an exciting evening; and a discussion with your father.  Your patient’s words came as a climax.’

’That is what I told myself,—­or, rather, that was what I tried to tell myself; because, in some extraordinary fashion, I had lost the command of my powers of reflection.’