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Where did you say they were?" He bustled up from his chair, without waiting for a distinct reply, and apologized to Lanfear in hurrying away. "You'll excuse me, doctor! I'll be back in half a minute. Friends of ours that came over on the same boat. I must see them, of course, but I don't believe they'll stay. Nannie, don't let Dr. Lanfear get away. I want to have some talk with him.
Yes: I know what I'm saying. I mean Mrs. Lanfear, the Professor's wife, poor Mrs. Lanfear, with her tight hair and her loose figure, her blameless brow and earnest eye-glasses, and her perpetual attitude of mild misapprehension.
"Well, both." Lanfear evaded her, partly. "They could be premonitions, prophecies, of a future life, as easily as fragmentary records of a past life. I suppose we do not begin to be immortal merely after death." "No." She lingered out the word in dreamy absence, as if what they had been saying had already passed from her thought.
"If you mean the psychopathic line, without being exactly an alienist, well, yes," Lanfear admitted. "That's exactly what I mean," the elder said, with renewed hopefulness. "I'm quite willing to risk myself with a man of the same name as Dr. Lanfear. I should like," he said, hurrying on, as if to override any further reluctance of Lanfear's, "to tell you her story, and then "
Once during the evening the public physician of the district looked in, but he agreed with Lanfear that nothing was to be done which he was not doing in his greater experience of the case. From time to time Gerald had suggested sending for some San Remo physician in consultation. Lanfear had always approved, and then Gerald had not persisted.
Heigh! Here! Take hold of these, will you?" He caught the sleeve of a facchino who came wandering by, and heaped him with his burdens, and then pushed ahead of the man in the direction of the baggage-room with a sort of mastery of the situation which struck Lanfear as springing from desperation rather than experience. Lanfear stood a moment hesitating.
The peasant girl said gayly in Italian: "He is mad; the earthquake made him mad," and urged the donkey forward. Lanfear, in the interest of science, habitually forbade himself the luxury of anything like foreboding, but now, with the passing of the madman, he felt distinctively a lift from his spirit.
Lanfear and the Geralds, therefore, continued together in the hotel without fear or obligation to others, and in an immunity in which their right to breakfast exclusively in that pavilion on the garden wall was almost explicitly conceded.
As far as Lanfear could note it, in the rapture of the new revelation to her which it scarcely needed words to establish, the process was a gradual return from actual facts to the things of yesterday and then to the things of the day before, and so back to the tragedy in which she had been stricken.
"Why, yes!" Lanfear consented, and in another moment he was shaking hands with the girl, to whom, he noticed, her father named him again. He had in his glad sense of her white morning dress and her hat of green-leafed lace, a feeling that she was somehow meeting him as a friend of indefinite date in an intimacy unconditioned by any past or future time.
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