" said Sam brusquely.

"All right. I'll tell you while you're undressing."

"I don't want to listen."

"A week ago," said Eustace Hignett, "I will ask you to picture me seated
after some difficulty in a carriage in the New York Subway. I got into
conversation with a girl with an elephant gun."

Sam revised his private commination service in order to include the
elephant gun.

"She was my soul-mate," proceeded Eustace with quiet determination. "I
didn't know it at the time, but she was. She had grave brown eyes, a
wonderful personality, and this elephant gun."

"Did she shoot you with it?"

"Shoot me? What do you mean? Why, no!"

"The girl must have been a fool!" said Sam bitterly. "The chance of a
lifetime and she missed it. Where are my pyjamas?"

"I haven't seen your pyjamas. She talked to me about this elephant gun,
and explained its mechanism. She told me the correct part of a
hippopotamus to aim at, how to make a nourishing soup out of mangoes,
and what to do when bitten by a Borneo wire-snake. You can imagine how
she soothed my aching heart. My heart, if you recollect, was aching at
the moment--quite unnecessarily if I had only known--because it was only
a couple of days since my engagement to Wilhelmina Bennett had been
broken off. Well, we parted at Sixty-sixth Street, and, strange as it
may seem, I forgot all about her."

"Do it again!"

"Tell it again?"

"Good heavens, no! Forget all about her again."

"Nothing," said Eustace Hignett gravely, "could make me do that. Our
souls have blended. Our beings have called to one another from their
deepest depths, saying.... There are your pyjamas, over in the corner
... saying 'You are mine!' How could I forget her after that? Well, as I
was saying, we parted. Little did I know that she was sailing on this
very boat! But just now she came to me as I writhed on the deck...."

"Did you writhe?" asked Sam with a flicker of moody interest.

"I certainly did!"

"That's good!"

"But not for long."

"That's bad!"

"She came to me and healed me. Sam, that girl is an angel."

"Switch off the light when you've finished."

"She seemed to understand without a word how I was feeling. There are
some situations which do not need words. She went away and returned with
a mixture of some description in a glass. I don't know what it was. It
had Worcester Sauce in it. She put it to my lips. She made me drink it.
She said it was what she always used in Africa for