Birdie screamed like a sea-gull and leapt on to the stage. The audience rumbled the usual applause, and Dr. Reginald Fortune put up his opera-glasses. He considered himself a connoisseur in the art of music halls, and Birdie Bolton was unique and bizarre. She was no longer young, and had never been pretty. A helmet of black hair, a gaunt face which never smiled, a body as lean as a boy’s, which sometimes slouched and sometimes jerked--such were her charms. She wore nothing much above the waist but diamonds, and below it barbaric flounces in a maze of colour. She began to sing in a voice wildly unfit for the strange creature she looked--a small, sweet voice--and what she sang was a simple ditty about her true love forsaking her. And then she went mad. There was a shrieking chorus--can you imagine a steam whistle playing rag-time?--and a dance of weird, wild vehemence. The lean body was contorted a dozen ways at once, the long white arms whirled and stabbed. She seemed to be a dozen women fighting, and each of them a prodigy of force. It was not a pretty dance, but it had meaning. Birdie sank down panting on her crazy rainbow flounces and nodded at the audience which thundered at her. Dr. Reginald Fortune shut up his opera-glasses. “She’s a bit of a wonder, you know,” he said to the naval lieutenant who was his companion. “It’s a wild bird,” the lieutenant agreed, and as the rest of the revue was merely frocks and the absence of frocks they went off to supper. In the morning, which was Sunday, Birdie Bolton came to see Dr. Reginald Fortune. It was her remarkable creed that she could not live in a noise, and so for years she had owned a house in the still rural suburb of Westhampton where Reggie and his father practised. The elder Dr. Fortune at first looked after her, but when Reggie came on the scene Miss Bolton, declaring with her usual frankness that she liked her doctors young, turned herself over to him. By daylight Miss Bolton dressed, and even overdressed, the part of a brisk British spinster. She was very tailor-made and severely tweedy, and thus looked leaner than ever. But her eyes retained a gleam of devilment. “You gave us a great show last night,” Reggie said. “Were you in front?” said Miss Bolton, and made a face. “Oh, Lord! Sorry. I was rotten.” Reggie understood that his professional interest was required. “What’s the trouble?” he said cheerfully. “That’s your show,” said Miss Bolton. “Put me through it.” The conversation then became confidential and dull upon the usual themes of a medical examination. At last, “Well, you know, we don’t get to anything,” Reggie said. “This is all quite good and normal. What’s making you anxious?” “Dreams,” said Miss Bolton. “Why do I have dreams? I never dreamed in my life till now.” “What sort of dreams?”