ddenly, with a smothered cry of surprise, Eleanor sat up. She seemed
to have recovered full consciousness and sensibility with an
instantaneous effect comparable only to that of electric light abruptly
flooding a room at night. A moment ago she had been an insentient atom
sunk deep in impenetrable night; now she was herself--and it was broad
daylight.

With an abrupt, automatic movement, she left the bed and stood up,
staring incredulously at the substance of what still wore in her memory
the guise of a dream.

But it had been no dream, after all. She was actually in the small room
with the low ceiling and the door (now shut) and the windows that
revealed the green of leaves and the blue and gold of a sun-spangled
sea. And her coat and hat and veil had been removed and were hanging
from nails in the wall behind the door, and her clothing had been
unfastened--precisely as she dimly remembered everything that had
happened with relation to the strange woman.

She wore a little wrist-watch. It told her that the hour was after four
in the afternoon.

She began hurriedly to dress, or rather to repair the disorder of her
garments, all the while struggling between surprise that she felt rested
and well and strong, and a haunting suspicion that she had been tricked.

Of the truth of this suspicion, confirmatory evidence presently
overwhelmed her.

Since that draught of champagne before the roadside inn shortly after
sunrise, she had known nothing clearly. It was impossible that she could
without knowing it have accomplished her purpose with relation to Alison
Landis and the Cadogan collar. She saw now, she knew now beyond dispute,
that she had been drugged--not necessarily heavily; a simple dose of
harmless bromides would have served the purpose in her overtaxed
condition--and brought to this place in a semi-stupor, neither knowing
whither she went nor able to object had she known.

The discovery of her handbag was all that was required to transmute
fears and doubts into irrefragable knowledge.

No longer fastened to her wrist by the loop of its silken thong, she
found the bag in plain sight on the top of a cheap pine bureau. With
feverish haste she examined it. The necklace was gone.

Dropping the bag, she stared bitterly at her distorted reflection in a
cracked and discoloured mirror.

What a fool, to trust the man! In the clear illumination of unclouded
reason which she was now able to bring to bear upon the episo