“Yes?”

“Would you mind telling us something of the mysterious Narcissus?”

“If you’ll be more definite,” I returned, in the tone of a question.

“There couldn’t be more than one like that,” said Miss Elliott, “at least, not in one neighbourhood, could there?  I mean a recklessly charming vision with a white tie and white hair and white flannels.”

“Oh,” said I, “He’s not mysterious.”

“But he is,” she returned; “I insist on his being mysterious!  Rarely, grandly, strangely mysterious!  You will let me think so?” This young lady had a whimsical manner of emphasising words unexpectedly, with a breathless intensity that approached violence, a habit dangerously contagious among nervous persons, so that I answered slowly, out of a fear that I might echo it.

“It would need a great deal of imagination.  He’s a young American, very attractive, very simple—­”

“But he’s mad!” she interrupted.

“Oh, no!” I said hastily.

“But he is!  A person told me so in a garden this very afternoon,” she went on eagerly; “a person with a rake and ever so many moles on his chin.  This person told me all about him.  His name is Oliver Saffren, and he’s in the charge of a very large doctor and quite, quite mad!”

“Jean Ferret, the gardener.”  I said deliberately, and with venom, “is fast acquiring notoriety in these parts as an idiot of purest ray, and he had his information from another whose continuance unhanged is every hour more miraculous.”

“How ruthless of you,” cried Miss Elliott, with exaggerated reproach, “when I have had such a thrilling happiness all day in believing that riotously beautiful creature mad!  You are wholly positive he isn’t?”

Our dialogue was now all that delayed a general departure from the table.  This, combined with the naive surprise I have mentioned, served to make us temporarily the centre of attention, and, among the faces turned toward me, my glance fell unexpectedly upon one I had not seen since entering the dining-room.  Mrs. Harman had been placed at some distance from me and on the same side of the table, but now she leaned far back in her chair to look at me, so that I saw her behind the shoulders of the people between us.  She was watching me with an expression unmistakably of repressed anxiety and excitement, and as our eyes met, hers shone with a certain agitation, as of some odd consciousness shared with me.  It was so strangely, suddenly a reminder of the look of secret understanding given me with good night, twenty-four hours earlier, by the man whose sanity was Miss Elliott’s topic, that, puzzled and almost disconcerted for the moment, I did not at once reply to the lively young lady’s question.

“You’re hesitating!” she cried, clasping her hands.  “I believe there’s a Darling little chance of it, after all!  And if it weren’t so, why would he need to be watched over, day and night, by an enormous doctor?”