"
"Would you go now and ask her what this dream means?" inquired Heyst
jocularly.
"She lived in Camberwell. She was a nasty old thing!"
Heyst laughed a little uneasily.
"Dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking
world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning
of."
"You have missed something out of this drawer," she said positively.
"This or some other. I have looked into every single one of them and
come back to this again, as people do. It's difficult to believe the
evidence of my own senses; but it isn't there. Now, Lena, are you sure
that you didn't--"
"I have touched nothing in the house but what you have given me."
"Lena!" he cried.
He was painfully affected by this disclaimer of a charge which he had
not made. It was what a servant might have said--an inferior open
to suspicion--or, at any rate, a stranger. He was angry at being so
wretchedly misunderstood; disenchanted at her not being instinctively
aware of the place he had secretly given her in his thoughts.
"After all," he said to himself, "we are strangers to each other."
And then he felt sorry for her. He spoke calmly:
"I was about to say, are you sure you have no reason to think that the
Chinaman has been in this room tonight?"
"You suspect him?" she asked, knitting her eyebrows.
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