She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman's face
and shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy disguise,
but her expression was serious.

"No," she replied. "It was distress, rather. You see, you weren't there,
and I couldn't tell why you had gone away from me. A nasty dream--the
first I've had, too, since--"

"You don't believe in dreams, do you?" asked Heyst.

"I once knew a woman who did. Leastwise, she used to tell people what
dreams mean, for a shilling."

"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.

"There is no one else to suspect. You may call it a certitude."

"You don't want to tell me what it is?" she inquired, in the equable
tone in which one takes a fact into account.

Heyst only smiled faintly.

"Nothing very precious, as far as value goes," he replied.

"I thought it might have been money," she said.

"Money!" exclaimed Heyst, as if the suggestion had been altogether
preposterous. She was so visibly surprised that he hastened to add: "Of
course, there is some money in the house--there, in that writing-desk,
the drawer on the left. It's not locked. You can pull it right out.
There is a rece