"Gerald--I mean Geraldine--how old are you?" "I am sixteen years." "You have never been away from home, you have never seen a city?" "What is a city?" "Oh, it's a place, a horrible place where it's all smoke, and houses, and noise." Geraldine shook her head. She could not imagine what such a place as this could be like. "Are there many more people in the world from where you come?" asked Geraldine after a pause, resting her chin on her hand and gazing at me with a deep, far-away look, as if she recognised me dimly but was not quite sure. "Oh, yes; but has your father never told you about the world and the people in it?" "No," said Geraldine, with a shake of the head; "he told me it was a bad place, and I must never go there, that was all." "Have you never wished to go there?" "No, never, till--till now." "Why now?" "I would like to go there if it is the place you come from." Geraldine was gazing at me now intensely--I know no other word--with eyes that seemed appealing to me to say something; never had I been gazed at so before. I could only falter out, "Why?" "Because," said Geraldine, "I think I know where you come from, I think I have seen you there, but it was in a dream, and we were not dressed as we are, but I am not sure. _Who_ are you?" I have never heard anything so soft and yet so full of a kind of fire as those words. "Has not your father told you, Geraldine?" "No--he said a lady was coming to see me, but that was all." "I am Beatrice Sinclair, Geraldine." "But that is only a name." A thought shot like a horrible zig-zag firework through my brain; it was, "Geraldine, I was once your murderer." Then bang from tragedy to comedy. I began to laugh, for no earthly reason, and Geraldine caught the laugh as it flew on her beautiful lips, and we both laughed at each other like two children--at nothing. Then we talked for an hour about--nothing. As Geraldine vanished that night to her own rooms I called her back, and she came back from the dark corridor like a beautiful ghost. I only wanted to kiss her again, but she seemed to think that a perfectly good reason for my calling her back. Then I went to bed and cried like a fool; then I got out of bed and hunted round the room in the dark, guess what for--a match-box, guess what to find--my cigarette box. I really think I must once have been a man. CHAPTER XI THE LITTLE BLACK BOOK I found it, and having lit the candle by my bedside I got back into bed and began to smoke. The fumes of the tobacco, the utter silence of the house broken only by the occasional sighing of the wind in the trees outside, the exquisite room in which I was lying with its painted ceiling and rose petal coloured hangings, the image of Geraldine, all combined to produce in my mind a sort of delicious intoxication.